Hello everyone

I'm having problems with exporting images from Inkscape when they contain shading.
I can produce eps and pdf files that look right. But if I try to convert the eps file to pdf, then it generally loses all the shaded areas. The problem is intermittent, so it's hard to track down just what circumstances cause it, but it only seems to happen when I use shading. I have reproduced it with a trivial file containing one shaded rectangle, though, and seen it fail. But not always. I've tried doing the conversion with both ghostscript and Adobe Acrobat and both fail.

I'm running Inkscape 0.46 on Windows XP (the previous version I used (0.45.1) had the same problem).

Has anyone else come across this? If so, I'd be interested if there are any work-arounds, or if this should be reported as a bug.

And if anyone is wondering why I would want to make a pdf by making an eps first, I need it so that I can get the images into a Latex document. And before anyone suggests using raw pdf images with pdflatex, I should explain that I have to submit it to the publisher as tex source + eps files and they make a pdf out of it. I get similar behaviour whether I convert the eps files to pdf alone, or as part of a postscript document produced by Latex.

Thanks.

EPS doesn't have support for all the effects that can be created with SVG. You haven't said how you're creating the shading. I can't test right now, but I thought EPS handled gradients ok so long as the gradients are completely opaque.

Thanks.

I'm using gradient shading, with no transparency. As you say, eps doesn't handle gradients with transparency (maybe it doesn't do transparancy at all?). But if I keep them fully opaque, then I can produce eps files that look just as they should when displayed.

BUT: there seems to be something wrong with them, because when I try to convert to pdf, either using ghostscript (version 8.51) or Acrobat (7.0.5 standard), I often (but not always) get a pdf file that does not look right, generally with all the gradient shading completely removed.

So I can make a pdf or an eps that looks fine (though I worry that if the eps doesn't convert to pdf, it might also have problems printing to some printers). But I need to be able to reliably turn that eps into pdf (for the reasons given above), and at the moment I can't, which is a shame because otherwise I like Inkscape very much. I could of course stop using gradients, but that's one of the reasons for using Inkscape in the first place...

To follow up my post, it seems that the problem only occurs when I convert postscript to pdf from inside gsview.

If I use the pstoedit program, then ps/eps files convert properly, and if I open the ps/eps files in Acrobat they convert to pdf properly too (either I was mistaken before about Acrobat also causing trouble, or it's behaving differently now).

The odd thing is that gsview calls pstoedit, so I don't know what's different.

I don't think it's just that (my?) gsview setup is broken, because I have no trouble using gsview to convert files with anything other than eps produced by Inkscape, but I can't say where the fault lies. Possibly Inkscape is doing something valid but unusual.

I updated my copy of gsview and ghostscript to the latest versions, and now gsview crashes while trying to make the pdf, rather than producing bad pdfs.

Anyway, this might still be worth looking into, but it's so complex that I don't know how I'd submit a bug report.

It's as likely to be a bug with gsview as it is to be with Inkscape. Since other software can convert the EPS to PDF ok, I would talk to the developers of gsview first--provide a copy of the file you have trouble converting.