Current PDF Support

Current PDF support

PDF Import

There is currently no support to automatically import PDF files in Inkscape.

PDF Export

pdf_output.inx exports PDF files by first saving them as Postscript and use an external converter to creat PDFs.

Requirements:

• ps2pdf (Installed separately)

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Current Postscript support

PS Import

ps_input.inx imports Postscript files by using two external conversion scripts:

Requirements:

• pstoedit (Installed separately)
• skconvert (Installed separately)

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

PS Export

Inkscape has built-in support to write Postscript files.

Strengths:

• Outputs nice readable Postscript

Weaknesses:

• Doesn't support fill patterns and clipping, see bugs 1208874 and 1170322
• Postscript doesn't support transparency and Inkscape doesn't emulate this, so they are just ignored, that is you get the color you would get with opacity:1

Current Adobe Illustrator support

The files used by AdobeIllustrator were earlier postscript files but are now Pdf files.

AI Import

Requirements:

• ill2svg.pl requires perl

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

• Only works on the old Postscript-based Adobe format
• Code is sort of a hack
• No maintainer exists for this code

AI Export

ai_output.inx exports Illustrator files by first saving them as Postscript and use an external converter to creat AIs.

Requirements:

• ps2ai.ps (requires gs)

Strengths:

Weaknesses:

Use of Gnulibplot

A short way for converting files to import in Inkscape is to use gsview and the command "edit/convert to vector format" to convert any pdf to svg. Easy and fast to use. Incidentally, gsview invokes a command similar to "pstoedit -f plot-svg input-file output-file" and, after downloading and installing pstoedit, this command can be run on the command line without opening gsview.