"Convert text to paths" in PDF export dialog has different behavior than converting text to paths manually

[Antoine Amarilli]

When you export a SVG to PDF and select "Convert text to paths" in the PDF export dialog, the PDF file which is generated can be different from what is obtained by selecting all texts in the document, doing "Path > Object" to path, and then exporting to PDF. This behavior is rather counter-intuitive.

The behavior can be reproduced with the file 2.svg attached. The file renders differently in Inkscape than (say) in Firefox. When you do the first method I described, you obtain a PDF file rendered as Firefox would render it. When you do the second method, you obtain a PDF file rendered as Inkscape would render it. It is strange to have a difference between the two methods, and I would argue that the result of the second one is more intuitive than the first.

So I think the option "Convert text to paths" in the PDF export dialog should have the same effect as the second method, i.e., selecting all text objects in the document and doing manually "Path > Object to path". The behavior of the current "Convert text to paths" option could be a different option, e.g., "Convert text to paths using BLAM", where BLAH is the method that the dialog currently uses.

Thanks!

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

the file 2.svg does not appear to contain any text. It has only a single path as far as I can tell.
could you attach the original svg file that had text, for testing purposes?

[Antoine Amarilli (a3nm)]

Sorry I messed up, the original attachment (now deleted) was the result of doing the "Object to path" operation. Here is the correct attachment. It requires you to have the font "Arial Black".

[Alvin Penner (apenner)]

thank you for the new file.
I was not able to reproduce the problem on my machine,
Windows 10, Inkscape 0.92.2 (5c3e80d, 2017-08-06)

I do not have the font Arial Black on my machine (or to be more precise, Inkscape does not seem to recognize it as a valid font) so Inkscape used some default font, I do not know which one. In any event, I tried both output methods and could not detect any difference.

Then I switched the text to be regular Arial, which looks significantly different from the Arial Black result. Then I tried both output methods again, but they both produced the same pdf result.

[Mc (mc...)]

I was able to reproduce (with Arial Black, on linux) : https://imgur.com/WfocPDi

[Antoine Amarilli (a3nm)]

I'm having a hard time reproducing this bug with another font than Arial Black. I managed to get it to reproduce also with "EB Garamond" (attached). Could this have something to do with the font type? (I think both are TTF fonts, but I don't see the problem with all TTF fonts.)

[Hugh Warrington (x-launchpad-hughw-org)]

I can reproduce this in Inkscape 1.1.1 (3bf5ae0d25, 2021-09-20) on Windows 10.

I have attached an SVG file, plus two PDFs. The first PDF is what I get when I manually run Path->Object to Path on the text before saving the first file as PDF. The second PDF is what I get if I tick the 'Convert text to paths' dialog option when I save the first file as a PDF.

It should be apparent from reading the SVG, but I used a block of text containing two spans. The first span uses font 'Eras Bold ITC' and the second span is 'Eras Demi ITC'. I'm not sure if it's necessary to mix the fonts like this to reproduce the bug, but I find it much easier to visually pick up on the weirdness this way.

I believe this issue is related or perhaps identical to bug #1396582. The poor behaviour I see of 'Convert text to paths' is the similar as described in that other ticket, i.e. thickened text.

[Antoine Amarilli (a3nm)]

Hi Hugh,

Thanks for resurrecting this! but if I'm not mistaken Inkscape no longer tracks issues on this bug tracker but on Gitlab, as per https://alpha.inkscape.org/bug-migration/

Could you open a new bug report about this problem on the Gitlab project? https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues

Thanks a lot!

[Hugh Warrington (x-launchpad-hughw-org)]

Thanks for the reply Antoine. My takeaway from https://inkscape.org/contribute/report-bugs is that there is still value in adding to issues on this bug tracker. It does say "please help us with transferring the report to GitLab" but relying on manual migration of each issue seems like a massively inefficient use of time. Even if I created a new issue in Gitlab I don't have the right permissions to close off this old issue as a duplicate. I don't have any insight into Inkscape development but I hope and expect that a scripted migration of all issues from Launchpad -> Gitlab will be conducted at some point.