Salve!

With my wife I am working on a project where we have to send in posters. We created the posters with inkscape but ran over multiple problems. Most severe was the effect that when we went to the copyshop and printed the finished poster all pictures came out in really bad quality. Although on the screen they looked as well as we expected. To this issue and permanent program crashes I hope to find help ...

1) The Posters were created using Win7 / Inkscape 0.48.2 or Ubuntu 12.04 / Inkscape 0.48.3. They include some text and either one big or up to 9 smaller pictures (.jpg or .png). All pictures were embedded.
While working with the program it crashed repeatedly no matter what we were actually doing. One time when the poster was saved (as a copy) as .pdf the program crashed and when we tried to open it again the file deleted itself and we had to do a lot of work again.
How can we avoid all the crashes? A similar problem appeared in another project when I was only working with paths and patterns, so there seems to be a general problem with stability

2) When we finally got the posters the way we wanted we exported them as .pdf (pictures to 300 dpi, later 600 dpi) and took them to a copyshop. There on the screen the .pdfs looked the way they were supposed to. Zooming into the pictures they were of original quality. When the poster came out of the printer (DIN A1) all pictures were blocky with pixels like 0,5mm in size.
Can you explain this effect? The owner of the shop seems to be knowing how to handle his printers so he complained about the "lousy pdf export of this strange freeware" ... I feel challenged and a little insulted ...

I now switched to 0.48.3.1 but did not yet work with it.
We used an EEEPC 1005P (32 bit, 1.66GHz, 1GB RAM, Win7 starter) or a Toshiba L650D-11G (64 bit, 2.3GHz dual core, 4GB RAM, Win7 Home Premium or Ubuntu 12.04).

Thanks for your help ...

I noticed in another topic, you said the files are around 12 mb. If these are the same kind of files, the file size is probably the source of the crashes. So that the only way to avoid them is to get more RAM.

That said however, the file size might not be solely responsible for the crashes. If a file has a large number of nodes, or a lot of gradients, or a lot of filters (includes blur) or....ok, here I made a message since I have to answer this question so often: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12160

I don't think I put it in that topic, but if the issues are caused by using a lot of filters (includes blur) and you have multiple cores, you can go to Inkscape Preferences > Filters > Number of threads. Change it to however many cores you have. If you're not sure, put something like 16 in there, then after restart, Inkscape will change that to match however many cores you actually have. When I did that, it more than doubled my performance with blurs! (I will add the info to that topic.)

Expected with version 0.49 will be a new renderer which is expected to help with many of the performance issues we have now. And I've heard rumors that 0.49 is not so far off. Next year, I guess I've heard

I can't answer your questions about the print quality. But we have several members who know a lot about printing, whom I'm sure will reply before too long. We have seen messages about professional printers who didn't know anything about Inkscape, who apparently declared it to be "raunchy freeware" and such. But of course we know it's not! Personally I don't know much about printing, but I do know there are a lot of different techniques. Perhaps the technique this guy uses is not what you need? He may know his machines, but maybe his machines are not what you need? But anyway, as I said, others who know about printing will answer soon

The size of the pictures may indeed be a problem. Although kind of the same problem appeared in a file where I did not use any pictures but only paths and patterns created out of paths ...
As there are no blurring-, filtering-, gradient- or other effects at least this doesn't seem to be the problem ...

Coming_Curse wrote:The size of the pictures may indeed be a problem. Although kind of the same problem appeared in a file where I did not use any pictures but only paths and patterns created out of paths ...
As there are no blurring-, filtering-, gradient- or other effects at least this doesn't seem to be the problem ...

thanks for your tip.
My file had a low definition when i print or export to pdf.
Because a filter, invert.
I remove the filter and now looks perfect.