Comment 0 for bug 1110549

In the dialog box for exporting to PDF, there are a number of options: a drop-down menu for choosing the version of PDF, plus a bunch of booleans controlled by checkboxes. Almost all of these are exposed to the command-line interface, but two are not: restrict to PDF version and rasterize filter effects. The current behavior seems to be that command-line exporting defaults to whatever was selected the last time the user went through the GUI. This is undesirable, because it means that in an automated process in which a script calls inkscape, the results silently change based on something the user did in the GUI. For my own use, I have problems with tools that have buggy support for PDF 1.5, so I want to make sure PDF 1.4 is never exported.

I think the defaults for command-line PDF export should be hardcoded and predictable, not based on the last thing the user did in the GUI. In particular, I think PDF 1.4 should always be the default for command-line export like this:

--export-rasterize-filters
--export-pdf-version=VERSION

Regardless of whether the defaults are unlinked from the GUI, it would be very helpful to have the two missing options exposed in the command line interface. If the defaults do get unlinked from the GUI, it would be important to add the options, because otherwise people who don't like the defaults would have no way to change them.

If there is a consensus on what the behavior should be, I think I could submit a patch. (It's been a long time since I've tried to build Inkscape on my machine.)

There seem to be other users who want this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/664335/comments/15