I have several minutes of experience with Inkscape (0.91) but this one puzzles me!

I created a pdf by scanning a piece of sheet music on my Canon scanner. Opened it in Inkscape. Added (i.e. pasted) two images which I copied from MS Paint. Saved the result as a pdf (using all default options). But when I open the saved file Adobe says a drawing error has occurred.

Even if I open the scanned image and make no changes and save the file as a 1.4 version file I get the same error.

I know nothing about pdf architecture (or Inkscape). Would one, or some combination, of the pdf saving options (e.g.. "Convert texts to paths") help? I absolutely need a pdf file saved as my goal is to use the resulting pdf file in an iPad app which requies pdf files.

Thanks much for any assistance anyone is willing to provide.

Bob

Which Adobe product is giving you this error message? Is this Adobe product necessary for your app?

Good to hear your system didn't crash on importing raster images!
(On windows and especially 64 bit version there is a known bug.)

Test the pdf if inkscape can re-open it, without an error.
If the pdf itself doesn't look good/doesn't open, would suggest to try a previous release.
Pdf save options should not relate to the problem as you described.

A good point/question brynn. About/Help says Adobe Reader XI Version 11.0.11. It looks like the copyright statement was last updated in 2012. I will look for something more recent. And no I don't need Adobe Reader for the iPad app. I only opened the result in Adobe Reader to test the result of the Inkspace editing. I am sort of afraid to throw an invalid PDF file at the iPad app.

Thanks for your help, Bob

Latest, freshly downloaded, Adobe Reader gives exactly the same error message.

Lazur URH wrote:Good to hear your system didn't crash on importing raster images!
(On windows and especially 64 bit version there is a known bug.)

Test the pdf if inkscape can re-open it, without an error.
If the pdf itself doesn't look good/doesn't open, would suggest to try a previous release.
Pdf save options should not relate to the problem as you described.

Thanks for responding Lazur.

My system is 64 bit (Win7).

Inkscape can open the file but much, not all, of the text is lost. It's interesting, the little bit of text which survives looks, to me, exactly like most of the lost text.

IIRC the Inkscape page did offer me an earlier version. I will try it after dinner.

Thanks again, Bob

bob12603 wrote:

Lazur URH wrote:Good to hear your system didn't crash on importing raster images!
(On windows and especially 64 bit version there is a known bug.)

Test the pdf if inkscape can re-open it, without an error.
If the pdf itself doesn't look good/doesn't open, would suggest to try a previous release.
Pdf save options should not relate to the problem as you described.

Thanks for responding Lazur.

My system is 64 bit (Win7).

Inkscape can open the file but much, not all, of the text is lost. It's interesting, the little bit of text which survives looks, to me, exactly like most of the lost text.

IIRC the Inkscape page did offer me an earlier version. I will try it after dinner.

Thanks again, Bob

Unfortunately I have to report that 0.48 is (mis)behaving in exactly the same way.

Hello

If you could share your design, it will make easier to give a diagnostic

Playing the "guessing game":
- You are using a special type face or font
- Are you using special characters? (eastern language, non-english language?, etc)
- Your raster images aren't well exported
- Nothing of the above

Again, try to share a file, or give (even) more information

Greetings

Ok, well having Adobe Reader report that there is something wrong with the drawing doesn't mean that there necessarily is. It just means that it can't display it properly. Programs which are capable of displaying vector images vary quite widely in their abilities to display Inkscape images.

I'm not sure what you mean by "...the little bit of text which survives looks, to me, exactly like most of the lost text." Does that mean it just has moved to a new location???

If there is any transparency in the Inkscape drawing, it might not look right, when saved as PDF. (A new bug with 0.91, afaiu)

You said "I absolutely need a pdf file saved as my goal is to use the resulting pdf file in an iPad app which requies pdf files." I'm curious why you're using Inkscape to create test files for your app. Surely PDFs created with Adobe itself would be truly correct PDF files, while conversion with other programs (like Inkscape) might not necessarily be true?

I appreciate all of the help I am getting here. I think that I can answer most of your questions by just posting the original pdf file. It's attached. It's a pdf file produced by my Canon scanner.

No complaint from Inkscape when I open it. And no complaint when I save it as a pdf file. (Just as an experiment I open it and then immediately save it to a new file.) However, when I close Inkscape there is a complaint ("saved with a format that may cause data loss"). But I am not sure what that might mean since there was no complaint when it was saved as a pdf. When I then try to open the file saved by Inkscape there is no compaint but a lot of the text has been lost.

Thanks again and goodnight,

Bob

brynn wrote: ...
You said "I absolutely need a pdf file saved as my goal is to use the resulting pdf file in an iPad app which requires pdf files." I'm curious why you're using Inkscape to create test files for your app. Surely PDFs created with Adobe itself would be truly correct PDF files, while conversion with other programs (like Inkscape) might not necessarily be true?

The iPad app is not an app I am testing, it is an app which I use (iGigBook - it displays and manages musical scores). I am sure that Acrobat would be the way to go but 1) it is expensive; and 2) I suspect that it is very complicated and I have such a simple thing I want to do - namely add two small graphics to the original scanned image, i.e. to the file attached in my other post.

And yes, maybe Inkscape does not produce pdf files adhering perfectly to the pdf rules. That's what I was trying to determine when I opened my edited file using Adobe Reader and got the "drawing error" which caused me to start this thread

Thanks for your continued interest/help.

Bob

bob12603 wrote:I think that I can answer most of your questions by just posting the original pdf file. It's attached. It's a pdf file produced by my Canon scanner.

Try this:

1. open the scanned document (PDF) in Inkscape
2. Add a new layer
3. Select all objects in the original layer, and move them to new layer
   (keep the selection)
4. Ungroup the selection twice
   (read message in the status bar: after ungrouping twice, there should be no more groups in the selection)
5. Save as Inkscape SVG
6. Add any vector overlay you need
   (I'd use yet another layer for that)
7. Save
8. Save a copy as PDF
9. View the new PDF with external PDF viewer of your choice.
10. Do not even attempt to edit the copy saved as PDF again (at least not in Inkscape) - use the version saved as SVG if needed.

I have uploaded a ZIP file containing both the SVG file and the copy saved as PDF file to Dropbox - would you mind testing how Adobe Reader handles this version of the PDF file? (I don't have it installed to test myself [*]).

Please keep in mind: Inkscape is NOT a PDF editor (no matter how much you'd prefer to view it as such). Inkscape uses external libraries for reading PDF (poppler) (supported content of the PDF document is converted to SVG structure) and for writing PDF (cairo) (the SVG structure is output to a PDF surface). Round-trip editing a lossy (from Inkscape's perspective) foreign vector file format (PDF) in an SVG editor is not guaranteed to produce similar, let alone identical results. PDF was designed as display format (identical output on different output devices), not as data exchange or easily editable image format. PDFs can include data not supported by Inkscape at all (e.g. OCR text in this case, as far as I can tell). And yes, Inkscape often does not a good job when being used to round-trip edit PDF documents (especially when masks are involved, as in this case for the visual representations of the OCR'd text).

-----
[*] I did test viewing the copy saved as PDF successfully with latest versions of Ghostscript, gv, Xpdf, mupdf, evince, poppler-glib-demo as well as with Apple's Preview.app on OS X 10.7.5.

~suv wrote:

bob12603 wrote:I think that I can answer most of your questions by just posting the original pdf file. It's attached. It's a pdf file produced by my Canon scanner.

Try this:

1. open the scanned document (PDF) in Inkscape
2. Add a new layer
3. Select all objects in the original layer, and move them to new layer
   (keep the selection)
4. Ungroup the selection twice
   (read message in the status bar: after ungrouping twice, there should be no more groups in the selection)
5. Save as Inkscape SVG
6. Add any vector overlay you need
   (I'd use yet another layer for that)
7. Save
8. Save a copy as PDF
9. View the new PDF with external PDF viewer of your choice.
10. Do not even attempt to edit the copy saved as PDF again (at least not in Inkscape) - use the version saved as SVG if needed.

I have uploaded a ZIP file containing both the SVG file and the copy saved as PDF file to Dropbox - would you mind testing how Adobe Reader handles this version of the PDF file? (I don't have it installed to test myself [*]).

Please keep in mind: Inkscape is NOT a PDF editor (no matter how much you'd prefer to view it as such). Inkscape uses external libraries for reading PDF (poppler) (supported content of the PDF document is converted to SVG structure) and for writing PDF (cairo) (the SVG structure is output to a PDF surface). Round-trip editing a lossy (from Inkscape's perspective) foreign vector file format (PDF) in an SVG editor is not guaranteed to produce similar, let alone identical results. PDF was designed as display format (identical output on different output devices), not as data exchange or easily editable image format. PDFs can include data not supported by Inkscape at all (e.g. OCR text in this case, as far as I can tell). And yes, Inkscape often does not a good job when being used to round-trip edit PDF documents (especially when masks are involved, as in this case for the visual representations of the OCR'd text).

-----
[*] I did test viewing the copy saved as PDF successfully with latest versions of Ghostscript, gv, Xpdf, mupdf, evince, poppler-glib-demo as well as with Apple's Preview.app on OS X 10.7.5.

Suv,

Wow! Thanks very much for such a thorough and well explained solution. And for the obvious effort you've put into this.

I will try your solution as soon as possible ... although it might take me awhile as I have no idea what layers and objects and groups are in PDF/Inkspace-terminology.

Yes, your file Willow-saved-as-copy.pdf opens fine in Adobe Reader. But, somewhat curiously, not in Inkspace. But I guess that is what you meant when you said that "Inkscape often does not a good job when being used to round-trip edit PDF documents ...".

Again, thank you very much.

Bob