[OSM-talk] SVG to PDF
Calum Polwart
gps at wittongilbert.free-online.co.uk
Tue Dec 19 20:23:43 GMT 2006
On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 10:00 +0000, Simon Hewison wrote:
> Jochen Topf wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > Is anybody aware of any Open Source software which turns SVG into PDF
> > keeping the data as vectors and not rasterizing it? Inkscape, rsvg,
> > batik all rasterize the image and then put it into the PS/PDF. You'll see
> > that if you zoom in. But PDF is a vector format, so it could be done
> > better. This is obviously difficult in cases where you use the more
> > advances features of SVG like filtering, but in our case with the maps it
> > should work just fine.
> >
> > If we want high quality printable maps, we need to create PDFs in some
> > way and instead of re-inventing the wheel I'd rather use osmarender to
> > create SVG and the PDF from there.
>
> I think that some of the reason is that SVG natively supports transparency
> levels (alpha channels), but Postscript, and hence PDF, does not.
>
> Adobe added transparency in Postscript 3, and PDF 1.4. A lot of people don't
> have printers/PDF viewers that support transparency.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(graphic)
>
> I suppose it would be easy enough to write a SVG to PDF that ignores
> transparency. It wouldn't look quite as pretty as it should.
>
Try Scribus (www.scribus.net)
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