[Feature] Additional PDF conversion options

[larienna]

There is 2 options I would like to add for the PDF conversion. It would simplify the conversion process into 1 step using only inkscape.

What I am currently doing is exporting the inkscape drawing as png, then printing it as PDF with gimp. But Gimp applies a jpg compression before printing it to PDF. SO the 2 options I would like added are:

Rasterise the whole drawing before exporting as PDF. This will be the equivalent of exporting to PNG and then to PDF.

Apply a JPG compression to the exported rasterised drawing (with the option to adjust the compression level). This will reduce the file size of the PDF at the end since 300 DPI PNG for a letter page can be actually quite big. (It easily exceed 10 Megs), With JPG compression, it stands around 2 megs and the compression does not affect much the quality when printed if you use a 300 dpi resolution.

So the general idea it to do everything in 1 step and prevent the use from using multiple software to perform each of theses conversions steps.

[Mahendra Tallur (mahen)]

Speaking of which, is there an option to rasterize "complex" objects, excluding texts and simple shapes of course ?

It seems inDesign kind of does it "automagically" with sane defaults. I'm asking this because I exported some pdf files (cf. email on the devel ML) that have some so complex parts they litterally make the pdf reader crash (it seems). But exporting the whole document as a bitmap would be a waste of bandwidth, when sending files over the internet.

Cheers & thanks to the devs / triagers etc. !

[su_v (suv-lp)]

related reports:
Bug #171774 “possibility to choose compression level for PDF output”
Bug #672135 “[Feature] Additional PDF conversion options”

[Maris Nartiss (maris-nartiss)]

Just "me too" style comment. LibreOffice has a really nice PDF export dialog allowing to set various aspects of exported PDF, including DPI of exported bitmaps, lossless or JPEG compression (with quality) etc.

Currently one of options how to get out of Inkscape with bitmaps in particular DPI is to save as SVG, import into LibreOffice Draw, export as PDF from LO.
On the internet are floating suggestions to set raster DPI on import. That is just a suboptimal solution as doesn't allow to export copies with different DPI settings (i.e. small PDF for preview, large DPI PDF for printing).