Hi, I'm sorry if this was asked before but I tried searching and didn't find anything. I am also very new to this so forgive my ignorance.

I am just trying to create a 5ft x 3ft flag image to send to the printers. They don't accept SVG files but only EPS or PDF. My graphic is very straightforward and just contains three lines of text and a raster image. It however does have a non-white background and the text is white.

I did set the background colour in Document Properties within Inkscape and it looks fine there. However when I save as an EPS or PDF, the background is not retained and it just has a white background. This means that none of the text is visible.

I also thought of creating a rectangle in order to put behind the other vector components and have the background that way. But I have no idea how to create a rectangle which covers the entire graphic without trying to adjust that manually.

Can anyone help me?

Welcome aboard!

As far as I know you will have to go with that rectangle method.
You can set the dimensions of the objects at the top boxes when they are selected.
Another way, is to open the xml editor with Shift+Ctrl+X, and put the right values into the right fields.

Yet another way, is to create guides around the page though the edit menu -previously the page set to the right size at the document properties panel-,
enable snapping to guides and cusp nodes,
and draw a rectangle manually -which will turn out right thank's to the snapping.

fyi - Inkscape has a transparent background by default (even though it 'appears' to be white when drawing). That's done to make it easier to draw on. but when you save as an EPS it automatically fills in anything without a fill - with a white fill, which is why you can't see the white text anymore. The easiest method is to make a rectangle as a background (as said above), and fill it with any color except white so that your text will show up again. good luck.

Thanks, it was really helpful and I achieved what I wanted using the "guides around page" option as advised.