Comment 25 for bug 168627

> when exporting to .pdf one already has the pop-up window asking about
> pdf version and converting text to paths. So why not to include there a
> checkbox "Include the objects outside the bounding box [ ]" (cleared by
> default, obviously)

My guess is "because it is not trivial".

With pixels it is easy: render everything, crop, throw away pixels out
of the crop box and you are done.

With vectors it is not as easy: how to determine what is outside of
the document? You could remove all objects which don't have any node
in the document, or remove all those which bounding boxes do not
intersect with the document. But then what about an object outside of
the page but which blur comes inside of the page? What abut a master
object outside of the page but which LPE transformed form comes inside
of the page? What about a group that has elements both inside and
outside of the page? One would need to dismantle the group, remove the
object(s) that are outside and recreate the group afterwards. The
theoretical simplest solution would be to perform a boolean
intersection operation between all objects of the drawing and an
object which has the size of the page. However, try using bool ops ob
complex paths and you'll soon see that is it far from straightforward.
Often when the path is altered, the inside becomes the outside, some
nodes become isolated etc. Even with a perfect bool op routine, this
might still affect the look of the drawing: blurs might not look the
same, LPEs either etc.

Finally, what's maybe more important is what I said above about the
way PDF works. There are several boxes and the one corresponding to
the page is the crop box. And for a PDF, crop is non destructive. So
people might actually expect the behaviour you want to suppress (i.e.
retaining objects outside of the page). Every other software that I
can think of works this way at least. Making it an option would
conciliate those use cases but I this would just be a band aid fix on
a more general problem (lack of support for these PDF boxes)... and a
band aid that would require a lot of work!

I am not saying that it won't happen. I am just trying to put your
issue in a more general context.

JiHO
---
http://maururu.net