Comment 5 for bug 169048

Unfortunately it does affect things besides the page edges, although the effect may be small enough to ignore. Using a bleed zone gets around the white rectangle problem but only in a print environment. PDF printing for on-line documents, however, is still completely affected. Second, a bleed zone only solves the white rectangle issue but doesn't solve the problem that postscript will be using a different coordinate space from Inkscape.

My original project was to design a business card so I did have a bleed zone outside the printable area. The problem is that objects are placed in the document referenced to the bounding box. I've made another example file where the "page" is 1.2"x1.2". This reflects my desire to have a 1"x1" final product with 0.1" margins on all sides for the bleed zone. I have placed a blue square at (0.1, 0.1) which is at coordinates (0,0) on my desired final document. If I print this to postscript and then read it into the gimp at 300 dpi I find the following problems. A 1.2" square document should be 300dpi*1.2"=360 pixels on a side but the actual document is 363. The black rectangle which is specified in inkscape as 1.2"x1.2" comes out as only 361x361. This is the origin of the white gaps. Finally, I expect the blue square to be .1" or 30 pixels above the bottom of the page. Instead it is 32 pixels. 2 pixels / 300 dpi = .007" which isn't much so perhaps it can be ignored. On the other hand, designers can use inkscape to theoretically place objects to .001" tolerance and this certainly destroys that kind of accuracy. In addition, I made the blue square 0.2" tall or 60 pixels but the resulting square is 61 pixels tall. This is only a .003" error but it is still annoying.

I am still using Inkscape 0.45.1.