Comment 26 for bug 168610

As of the Inkscape in svn both patterns and gradients seem to be exported correctly to PDF.

However, please note that you may need to use acroread to view the PDFs, since other PDF viewers may not be capable of viewing these files.

For example, a PDF viewer called evince uses the poppler library to for its PDF capability, and poppler had a bug that won't let it render text with a pattern:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14577

Any other PDF viewers that use poppler will have this problem.