I have Inkscape .48 installed as an upgrade from .47. It was installed in elevated Administrator mode. However, I still have problems with imported SVG and PDF files. I am running Window 7 Home Premium on an Intel Core Quad processor. I cannot import SVG clipart files from Open Clipart and when I import PDF files created with Adobe Illustrator, I lose some elements in the file. The SVG files give an error when trying to load. The PDF files show fine in the preview before importing but lose graphic and font elements when imported. The graphics are gradients and I believe I have read that Inkscape can't handle gradient graphics.

I'm really new to Inkscape. I need someone to confirm that I will likely have to buy Adobe products to do what I need to do.

Guest wrote:I need someone to confirm that I will likely have to buy Adobe products to do what I need to do.

That's hard to answer. You haven't told us what you need to do.

If what you need to do is create or edit Adobe Illustrator files or PDFs, then you'd probably be best buying Illustrator. If you just want to create or edit SVG images, Inkscape's fine.

I've just opened a couple of Illustrator-created Open Clipart files in Inkscape without issue. Direct us to a problematic example.

PDF import; I've had some issues with fonts myself. You ideally need the same fonts installed (with the exactly correct name) as the PDF uses, otherwise Inkscape uses substitutes, which you may well have to manually correct. Gradients: Inkscape certainly has gradients. I thought the problem was 'tother way round, with PDFs rasterizing vector gradients on creation; but I don't really know.

Hmmm. I thought I was logged in when I posted.

I have a number of PDFs that a graphics designer made for our business using Adobe Illustrator, including business cards, brochures, letterhead, etc. I need to open and edit the business cards to include/revise names, phone numbers and email addresses. As I said above, the PDF import settings dialog box previews the contents of the PDF correctly.


When I open some PDFs, some of the objects don't display that are gradients such as our logo and a bottom border on which the website and email addresses are superimposed. Text shows up incompletely. An example is the word "Officer" which shows up as "Of icer." But, this behavior is not consistent from one PDF to another. For some PDFs, all the objects show up and I can edit them.


The SVG problem turned out to be operator error. I saved the pages as a web-text instead of web-svg only.

gbruner wrote:I have a number of PDFs that a graphics designer made for our business using Adobe Illustrator, including business cards, brochures, letterhead, etc.

I'm heavily favouring "Buy Illustrator" at this point. "Go back to the designer" is an even better answer, but I'm assuming that's out of the question.

(Would I be wrong in picking up a "We don't want to spend money" vibe here? And that your "the guy that does computers" rather than "a graphic designer"?)

You still may have issues - you don't necessarily have the fonts he used, and it looks like you don't have his .ai files (i.e. you've got his exports, not his working files). I don't know how good a job Illustrator is going to make of what you've got; I'd hope it would be better than Inkscape, but it might not be.

I went to look up how expensive Illustrator is ("horrendously expensive"; which doesn't mean "unjustifiably expensive"), and saw that you could download a trail version. So I suggest you do that, and see if it works. If it does, you've got a reason to buy it.

(Whereupon I foresee some fixing up with the trial version, and no-one buying anything, as usual)

This is a startup company that is not well funded at this point. Yes, I'm the computer guy that does graphics, website design, video, training, consulting, sales, customer service and writing. I have no funds to buy anything...ergo, Inkscape. We have horrendously expensive Adobe on our todo list when we make some money. I'll likely have no choice because some work was done in InDesign. Right now all I'm trying to do is take the PDFs we were given and make minor changes to our business cards. If I can do that with Inkscape, all the better, but using a trial of Adobe is on my list of backups. I still don't have all the uncompleted design work yet and want to get it all in hand before the 30 day clock starts. Dealing with the graphics artist is not possible at this point.

Well, I figured out a work around. I'll just take a card that shows all the objects, make a template and redo all the business cards. I could have already finished if I started that when I made this post. Sorry for the imposition.

All done in a couple of hours.