Comment 125 for bug 179988

Adrian: Great! The patched cairo seems to have fixed the errors on radial gradients. No errors at all. I don't know how you guys keep doing this, but I hope my testing is helping. Just have to get this patched cairo into the dev libs - I guess the patch would go to Ishmal in the short term, and upstream in the longer term.

I still think there's a bit too much dropping back to bitmap going on, and not all printer drivers allow to adjust the resolution. For instance take the above creation file (https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/179988/comments/113), ungroup, select all and turn off all blurs, then print - it drops most of the image back to pretty low res bitmap because of the gradients (I believe). But if I save as PDF it prints out perfectly.

Apart from dropping back to bitmap on gradients, the only other thing I can think of to work on is blurs, but unless Adib or others have lots of time I think that will have to wait for 0.46.1. There is always the option to print bitmap, but it just produces huge files, which will probably be slow to print using a parallel cable, but maybe not so bad with usb. I find blurs are sometimes misaligned and sometimes cause black shapes on the PS2 Apple Laserwriter 12/660 that I've got set up as a PS2 print tester (sample of the above creation picture attached). Turning off blurs fixes the black shapes problem. The PS3 HP 4550 doesn't suffer from the black shapes problem.