Hello,

Totally new to Inkscape and am using .47 on Mac OS X 10.6.4.

I was previously using .svg files downloaded from WikiMedia Commons, opening them in GraphicConverter as large .PNGs, and then editing them there (recoloring, etc.).

One had a slimmer outline than I would have liked, and I got the bright idea, "Hey, why don't I open it in that Inkscape I've heard about and edit it there?" I open up the .svg, Select All, and used the very first filter in the list, Black Outline. It did exactly what I wanted and looked great! So I Save As an Inkscape .svg.

But the resulting document is only an error message, which looks like this:

"This page contains the following errors:
error on line 100 at column 5: Encoding error
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error." [Below is actually nothing. None of my software can do anything else with this file.]

So I tried saving it as a regular .svg instead of the Inkscape flavor. This resulted only in what appeared to be a clone of the original .svg file, minus the changes made by applying the filter.

There is a box around the image (before I select it). When I use the filter, the additional black outline added by the filter went beyond the edges of the box. "Perhaps this is the problem," I thought, and so I tried scaling the filtered image down with Transform:Scale so that it fit within the box, then saving it as an .svg. This failed in the exact same way detailed above.

As a beginner to this program, I expect to have a lot of what it's doing go over my head, but I figured applying only one filter and saving to the same format would be relatively straightforward. There must be something utterly basic I am missing. I did examine the manual; the description of filters indeed makes their use sound very straightforward, and I could find no reference to this particular error message in the free online version of the manual.

Can anyone tell me what's causing the errors? I welcome suggestions on how to proceed with my goal of an error-free black-outlined .SVG. Thank you in advance for your time.

Stilton wrote:Hello,

Totally new to Inkscape and am using .47 on Mac OS X 10.6.4.

I was previously using .svg files downloaded from WikiMedia Commons, opening them in GraphicConverter as large .PNGs, and then editing them there (recoloring, etc.).

Ok, Q no 1. by GraphicsConverter do you meen the software by http://www.lemkesoft.com/ ?

Any chance of a link to the file on Wikimedia Commons so that we can take a look at it. These kind of problems can depend a lot on the individule svg files.

Stilton wrote:One had a slimmer outline than I would have liked, and I got the bright idea, "Hey, why don't I open it in that Inkscape I've heard about and edit it there?" I open up the .svg, Select All, and used the very first filter in the list, Black Outline. It did exactly what I wanted and looked great! So I Save As an Inkscape .svg.

But the resulting document is only an error message, which looks like this:

"This page contains the following errors:
error on line 100 at column 5: Encoding error
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error." [Below is actually nothing. None of my software can do anything else with this file.]

Where do you get the error message. When opening the .svg file into graphics converter? safari? or another image viewer?

Stilton wrote:So I tried saving it as a regular .svg instead of the Inkscape flavor. This resulted only in what appeared to be a clone of the original .svg file, minus the changes made by applying the filter.

There is a box around the image (before I select it). When I use the filter, the additional black outline added by the filter went beyond the edges of the box. "Perhaps this is the problem," I thought, and so I tried scaling the filtered image down with Transform:Scale so that it fit within the box, then saving it as an .svg. This failed in the exact same way detailed above.

As a beginner to this program, I expect to have a lot of what it's doing go over my head, but I figured applying only one filter and saving to the same format would be relatively straightforward. There must be something utterly basic I am missing. I did examine the manual; the description of filters indeed makes their use sound very straightforward, and I could find no reference to this particular error message in the free online version of the manual.

One thing to bare in mind is that not all image viewers can cope with svg filters. For example, GraphicsConverter appears to use ImageMagick to convert SVG's into other formats. Unfortunately, ImageMagick does not support svg filters.

Therefore using a filter would not be an option if you wanted to load the .svg into GraphicsConverter (The filter will just be ignored).

Stilton wrote:Can anyone tell me what's causing the errors? I welcome suggestions on how to proceed with my goal of an error-free black-outlined .SVG. Thank you in advance for your time.

What destination format do you need? Inkscape con convert directly into png files by going File->Export Bitmap...

Hope that helps, tom

One had a slimmer outline than I would have liked,....

If your image is very simple, you may be able to simply widen the Stroke, thereby avoiding the filters altogether (assuming the errors are attributable to the filter). To be sure it all fits inside the page border, open Document Properties > Page tab > click Fit page to selection.

If it is a more complex image, and the outline is somewhat like a drop shadow, it might be fairly simple to create the outline yourself. Although not having seen the image, I will hold off on offering detailed instructions.

Just a couple of ideas, based the word "outline".