I see this problem has already been addressed here and here . The reason exported pdfs with gradients take so long to render is because the gradient is automatically turned into a bunch of tiny strips. I believe the solution suggested in the bug report I link to above, adding an "export gradien...

I'm an Inkscape newbie and I'm lovin' it. I'm working on drawings that will end up in pdf documents by being included in LaTeX documents. I prefer to export to eps because this speeds up the pdf rendering compared to when I export to pdf (and \includegraphics{$NAME.pdf}). I was struggling with trans...