text gets rendered with ugly, random spacing

[Brandon Rhodes]

When I ask Inkscape to render the following SVG file with the command line:

inkscape -z --export-text-to-path -A test.pdf test.svg

then the resulting PDF file, as attached below, has quite ugly text. Some characters get run together so that they touch, while other characters have noticable gaps between them. But the big problem is that Inkscape seems unaware of how long each line of text is, and therefore can't do the text-anchor="end" properly that the SVG asks for. As you can see, some letters wind up hanging off the page while others do not, and very few characters happen to align. I am not sure whether this is related to the weird spacing or not; but odd spacing, besides being ugly, might make it hard to predict where a right-edge was going to wind up.

[Brandon Rhodes (brandon-rhodes)]

I note, after some experimentation, that the PS and EPS output do *not* suffer from the above problem. For the moment, therefore, I can survive by making Inkscape output to EPS and then running:

ps2pdf -dEPSCrop file.eps file.pdf

[su_v (suv-lp)]

not reproduced with Inkscape 0.47 r22583 and 0.47+devel r9469 on OS X 10.5.8

Do you still see this bug when exporting to PDF (using 'Convert texts to paths') with the current Inkscape version (0.47) or a recent development build?

[Brandon Rhodes (brandon-rhodes)]

You're right! The current version of Inkscape on my Ubuntu box (Inkscape 0.47 r22583) produces a quite beautiful PDF from my sample SVG file, above. I wonder what change in Inkscape or the rendering libraries beneath it fixed this situation? In any case, I am now quite happy. :-)