Hi all,


I have a drawing in SVG which I want to print, but when I print it, many of the items are not printed. Initially I printed directly to my printer.

Then I decided to save the svg drawing as a pdf (via Cairo) to print that. Now all items are printed, but to my astonishment, an extra item, a rectangular box is drawn, though the image, which is not present in my drawing in Inkscape.

I have a PDF writer installed on my computer, which behaves like a printer, but writes a PDF instead. When I select that as printer, when printing in Inkscape, I get the same result as when I print directly to my printer.

My drawing in SVG (.svg, 90 KB)

What I get when I "save as PDF (via Cairo)" in Inkscape(.pdf, 34 KB)

What I get when I print directly to my printer or the PDF writer (.pdf, 69 KB)


I did not draw the coat of arms myself, I found the image on Wikipedia. I did however add the text and I enlarged the page to A4 size.

I tested this on two different computers with different printers, with identical results.

I work with Inkscape 0.46, april 1, 2008, on a Windows XP Professional SP3 machine.


If anyone can point out what's wrong with my svg file, causing items not to be printed and where the border comes from when I save as PDF, please help.

Thanks in advance.

Handling of PDF has been much improved since 0.46 came out, so you can expect improvements in the next Inkscape version or you can download a development build and test it right away. I'm not sure if printing from Inkscape also got better.

Since you're on winXP you should ask on the dev or user mailing list if it's safe to download a dev version now, I think there were crashes in the dev build some time ago and I'm not sure if they were fixed. Maybe someone with XP and a dev build can confirm it here.

Hi, ErikTiePie
maybe you should try another application for converting SVG to PDF. I use Altsoft Xml2PDF Workstation and I have no claims on its work

Good luck!

I've saved to pdf and no strange thing appeared but i'm using development version of inkscape. You can get it here for windows:
http://inkscape.modevia.com/win32/?M=D

the strange thing, is if I change the view to Outline mode... i can see that square on the file.. but cannot edit it, it looks like a rendering bug because if I move things around it doesn't redraw correctly.

just had another attempt:
change the view to outline mode (View menu > Display mode> Outline)
now you see that square, you cant select it with the selection tool... but... with the node tool you can!.. select all 4 nodes of the square..and delete.

rico wrote:just had another attempt:
change the view to outline mode (View menu > Display mode> Outline)
now you see that square, you cant select it with the selection tool... but... with the node tool you can!.. select all 4 nodes of the square..and delete.

Thank you, that did it. I never thought of going to outline mode.

I already switched to dev build a while back, which improved saving to PDF a huge lot.