I am trying to upload text/images to Lulu.com, a self-publishing site, to print a children's book. A friend of mine (who is on vacation for 2 weeks and is unavailable) suggested (before he left on vacation) that I save the text/images as .EPS in order to avoid bitmaps altogether for the following reasons:

There are several reasons to use the new workflow:
1) No jaggies.
2) Faster (rendering a 600 dpi full sized page takes about 7 seconds
on my machine; saving as EPS takes less than a second.)
3) Easier (all those little 7 second pauses are distracting, and
increase your chances of messing something up.)
4) Smaller files (they will upload faster, and take less space to
store on your hard drive.)
Having one PDF for the whole book is convenient and useful.

My friend e-mailed me with the following instructions:

When you save as EPS, it brings up a dialog box with the following options:

Make bounding box around full page
Convert texts to paths
Embed fonts (Type I only)....I selected all of these options, though you should try leaving off "embed fonts".

My friend then went on to say, “Lulu should be happy to take your book as one big PDF file. You can do that in Open Office with either Writer (the word processor) or Draw (the drawing program). They both seem to work well with InkScape drawings saved to EPS. Note that the vectored drawings (EPS) are much smaller than the PNGs. If you use one big PDF file, using vectored drawings instead of PNGs will keep that file from getting too big.”

I attempted to do what my friend suggested above and the dialogue box I have is different than what he has. Perhaps we have different versions of Inkscape? I have 0.47.

Also, when attempting to save the file as an EPS through my dialogue box, the warning sign says specifically, “The file was saved with a format (org.inkscape.output.svg.inkscape) that may cause data loss!” And again, the only options were to save as an SVG file, close without saving or cancel. When I hit "save as an SVG file", it wanted to save as .svg vs. EPS.

Does anyone know how I can save my text/images as .EPS using Inkscape? What steps do I need to take specifically? And regarding the dialogue box, what items should I check off? I would really like to get this done ASAP and your accurate input would be greatly appreciated!

Hi,

I don't see why you can't just save it as a PDF with everything kept as vector.

If you just do "File->Save As..." and choose "Portable Dokument Format (PDF)"
Then in the box select "Convert text to paths" all your text will be saved as vector (non editable) and look exactly as you had it in Inkscape.
If you use any blur for drop shadow and such (which can be needed to get a specific look/feel) just check the "Rasterize filter effects" and set the "Resolution for rasterization (DPI)" to something like 300 or higher to ensure that it will look good when being printed.

Here's a screen shot of my save as pdf settings and finally the pdf, opened and double checked and all shapes are vector (except for the blur of course ) and the text is all vector.

Hi there and thank you for responding to my inquiry!

The big reason my friend wants me to get away from vector is because without bitmaps, there are no jaggies. Do you agree?

He also cited these other reasons:

1) Faster (rendering a 600 dpi full sized page takes about 7 seconds
on my machine; saving as EPS takes less than a second.)
2) Easier (all those little 7 second pauses are distracting, and
increase your chances of messing something up.)
3) Smaller files (they will upload faster, and take less space to
store on your hard drive.)
4) Having one PDF for the whole book is convenient and useful.

Missy wrote:Hi there and thank you for responding to my inquiry!

The big reason my friend wants me to get away from vector is because without bitmaps, there are no jaggies. Do you agree?

That sounds like a contradiction. Vectors are always smooth whereas a low resolution bitmap gets "jaggedy" if stretched over a big enough area.
So you most likely want to go with vectors. Your first inquiry hints of this as well, since EPS is capable of holding vector graphics.

Missy wrote:He also cited these other reasons:

1) Faster (rendering a 600 dpi full sized page takes about 7 seconds
on my machine; saving as EPS takes less than a second.)
2) Easier (all those little 7 second pauses are distracting, and
increase your chances of messing something up.)
3) Smaller files (they will upload faster, and take less space to
store on your hard drive.)
4) Having one PDF for the whole book is convenient and useful.

That sounds about right. I would like to know a bit about your workflow however; do you use OpenOffice to write the texts and Inkscape to draw the graphical elements?
If this is the case, you should really save your graphics as SVG and simply import them into OpenOffice – OO handles SVGs with grace. Finally, when you want to wrap up your work, simply export your OO-document to PDF.

edit: as a matter of fact, I just now tried to save as EPS. If you want to go with that, it shouldn't be a problem. Note that the box that says "Rasterize filter effects" will, if checked, cause your EPS to both grow in size and create a pixellated image if you are using any kind of gradient or blur on your image. This is a drawback of the (ancient) EPS-format, as it cannot store this kind of data. If possible, use SVGs for as much as you can.

edit 2: my bad. It turns out OpenOffice does NOT handle plain SVG files (to my great surprise).
You could try saving your image as ODG which is the native format for OpenOffice Draw. This format doesn't seem to handle gradients either, however.

If you have complete pages made up in Inkscape, then I would export as pdf as I think that is Inkscape's best vector export format. (everything that can remain a vector will do so in the PDF (filters cannot as PDF does not support them, so if you use filters they have to be converted to raster).

After exporting the pages as PDF's I would then combine them using a piece of software (eg these PDF mergers )

It should also be noted that Inkscap's EPS output rasterises more than its PDF output does. EG all transparent objects will be rasterised when using EPS output in Inkscape

Also... you don't have to have filter effects or blur effects of course... i just mentioned that in my example just to show that it's possible to produce a nice clean vector PDF that also contains high resolution bitmap elements.
Sometimes illustrations can look a bit stiff/dry and benefit a lot with blur shadows.
Kind of best of two worlds

Missy wrote:1) Faster (rendering a 600 dpi full sized page takes about 7 seconds
on my machine; saving as EPS takes less than a second.)
2) Easier (all those little 7 second pauses are distracting, and
increase your chances of messing something up.)
3) Smaller files (they will upload faster, and take less space to
store on your hard drive.)
4) Having one PDF for the whole book is convenient and useful.

1. Faster render where? as in open PDF in a PDF viewer? if so why do you need it to be 600 DPI? is it for reading or printing?
2. Maybe make one version for reading and another for printing, that way the reading file will be fast to download and change pages in.
3. A fully vectorized PDF in perfect for small filesize.
4. True... no one wants to read something from a bunch of files instead of a multi page PDF.

Make a PDF, send it and see what they say, can't go wrong