[OSM-talk] SVG to PDF

[Jochen Topf]

On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 04:37:49PM +0000, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> Quoting Robert Hart <Robert.Hart at BuroHappold.com>:
> 
> > Maybe the problem is with your viewer? What are you using? I'm using
> > Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 on WindowsXP, but I'm sure xpdf was fine too.
> 
> It's definitely vectorised, because I can open it in Illustrator and  
> drag lines around. That said, Preview (Apple's OS X PDF viewer)  
> renders it completely blank, so there's something funny going on here.

This is getting weirder every minute. On my Mac (OS X 10.3.9) I can see
it perfectly vectorized with Preview. On Linux xpdf, kpdf, Acrobat 5 are
pixelized, Acrobat 7 is fine. The postscript file generated by inkscape
when printing is pixelized when views in Ghostview. On those programs
where its pixelized I can only zoom in 400% or 1600%. On Acrobat 7 6400%,
on the Mac even further.

I have tried the following options in inkscape:
- printing to postscript file, then using ps2pdf
- save as... Format "PDF with transparency" without "Text to path"
- save as... Format "PDF with Text and Images" with "Text to path"
- save as... Format "Postscript" (.ps)
- save as... Format "Encapsulated Postscript" (.eps)
- save as... Format "Encapsulated Postscript Interchange" (.epsi)
All with the same results.

Saving from inkscape as open office drawing is very slow and the result
is very broken. So thats not an option either.

I also tried loading the SVG into scribus, which can export PDF with
many options but it was too slow to get anything done even with a medium
sized map.

So where does that leave us? It looks like the data is there but not all
viewers can show it. But that probably means, I could give the PDF to a
professional printer to print large scale maps. They'll have the right
software to do this.

But for consumption by "normal" people it would be nice if we could find
out what the problem is, why the maps don't show properly (or at all) on
some viewers. I have other (non OSM) maps which show perfectly on all
viewers, so it can be done.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298