Need help with saving SVG as PDF (at 600 DPI, or 300 DPI).

Inkscape: 0.48.2-1
Win7 (also tried with WinXP on a different machine)

The PNG shows the effect I'm after; namely diffuse light on the gold objects with a faked dropped shadow below in black.
I would like to generate a PDF of the image at 300 or even better at 600 DPI.
This will be printed onto a felt nearly 4 feet x 8 feet.

The stuff in gold/yellow has been filtered with Filters > ABCs > Diffuse Light.
Sometimes Inkscape will save some of the letters along with one or 2 of the lines.
Most of the time the blurred objects (in black below the gold) dissappear.

EDIT: The SVG is 263 KB (limit is 256 KiB).

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

Hhmmm....Are you actually working with the 4' x 8' canvas? If so, I'm thinking it might be the size of the image rather than the PDF conversion, that's causing the problem. I have successfully created a PDF with blur using Inkscape, so I know it can be done (I'm also on a Win7 machine). Although I just used the basic blur, not a fancier filter like the one you used. But especially because you seem to get a different result each time you try the conversion, indicates that it can be done.

Is PDF the only format the printer will accept? I wonder if they would accept the SVG? How much RAM do you have? If it's 2 gb or less, could you test on a machine with more? (maybe 4 gb)

Ah, I see you edited your orginal message. So it seems that size is probably not the issue. Hhhmmm.....

I'm stumped I guess the answer to what the printer will accept must be PDF, period? Hhmmm.... I guess there are all kinds of web-based conversion engines out there. So maybe you could find another way to convert to PDF. Although I really don't understand why it's not working.

Idea -- the text, is it still text or have you converted to paths. If you applied the filter to the text itself, you could try removing the filters, then convert text to path (Path menu > Object to Path) and then re-apply the filter. Text can be troublesome for some file conversions, so converting to paths can avoid that.

Cross fingers

Thanks brynn,

The inkscape canvas is 4'x8'. I did this (my first inkscape svg or svg ever) full scale thinking I shouldn't have any issues printing later.

In order to get this printed I am told it has to be an AI file or PDF. I have sent the Inkscape SVG and they could not work with it.

For the Text, I tried both ways, by first converting to path and applying filters as you described. Secondly, by not converting to path.
I also noticed that the black drop shadows disappear sometimes. The shadows are simply a copy of the image above, with a 0.5 or 1.0 basic blur in fill-n-stroke.

By the way, when I save-as PDF with 90 DPI all the features are present. If I increase the DPI (tried 180) some features start to disappear.
When I tried 300 dpi the resulting PDF was only 2.5 MB.

In any case, I removed some features so that I could upload the SVG here in this forum.

Oh, ok, so it's not terribly large as far as KBs, but in dimensions, it's pretty big!

But it does sound like increasing the DPI is causing the problem. I'm actually quite confused by DPI in Inkscape, because it's apparently not the same as DPI in raster graphics, at least not in the File menu > Export Bitmap dialog (where changing dpi changes size of image, not quality). Starting with this message, read the next few messages: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2037&p=44366#p44355

It seems that changing the dpi in Export Bitmap changes size but not quality. However, Edit menu > Make a Bitmap Copy seems to use dpi in a different way. I do recall seeing the dpi setting in the PDF dialog, but I had no need to change it for my project. If changing dpi in the PDF dialog changes the size, like it does in Export Bitmap, then your 300 dpi result is likely the size of a small house, lol! But I'm so confused about dpi at the moment, I don't even know what to say.

Maybe someone else can educate both of us?