Richy_T

SVG Import from Inkscape - Text missing.

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I like to work in inkscape. I have just started with the Vinylmaster with our new cutter and I have noticed that when importing SVGs, the text is missing. I am not doing anything complex and this was even with plain-old-arial at a reasonable size. Any other paths added to the SVG appear correctly. I'll probably dig in and see if there's anything I can notice but thought I would post here first. I also tried having the text with no fill but with a stroke and it didn't make any difference. Interestingly, if I select-all in inkscape and then paste into Vinylmaster, it works OK but I would like to be able to import correctly.

I did try converting to paths but that resulted in some strange behavior with shapes inside of letters appearing in strange places for a couple of fonts. I'm not sure what that's about but I'll try and reproduce it and make a separate post on that.

I also tried working with some artwork with cloned items. That didn't turn out too well (the cloned items did not appear and the item cloned from appeared in the middle of the document), That is an advanced feature though so I'm not too concerned about that.

drawingdel.svg

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Another thing I just noticed. I was preparing my work on a 60x12 inch page. When I pasted it into Vinylmaster with the default page, it looked about the right size. However, when I increased the vinylmaster page to 60x12 inches and *then* attempted to paste, the pasted item was many times bigger than it should have been.

The paste method also results in the text becoming individual letters which is obviously less than optimal.

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Guest Future Support

A quick way to transfer artwork from inkscape into VMP is to select it all in inkscape, and copy it to the clipboard (CTRL + C), then go into the VMP and press "CTRL + V" (paste) and paste it in. If you want to to paste in at the exact size, just click once without moving the mouse and the artwork will be added to your design page.

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I see your using Inkscape .48.5.  That version used an internal dpi of 90 internally. It might be the cause of the size discrepancy when you paste as many other programs expect 96 dpi.  If this is happening i think its like a 1.06666666667 percentage difference, or something like that. 

I'm not sure why your getting blank text when importing.  Inkscape I think creates all text inside a <tspan> object that is wrapped by a <text> object. Looking at the "arial" block of text I see:

<text
       xml:space="preserve"
       style="font-size:72px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Segoe Script;-inkscape-font-specification:Segoe Script"

and

sodipodi:linespacing="125%"><tspan
         sodipodi:role="line"
         id="tspan3905"
         x="82.85714"
         y="135.21933"
         style="-inkscape-font-specification:Arial;font-family:Arial;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-variant:normal">arial</tspan>

One says Segoe Script and the other Arial.  Maybe this is confusing VM.  You could try saving a copy of the file as Plain SVG and see if it helps.

However I think its time to upgrade to .92 and try.  Lots of bug fixes and new features in .92.  .48 is a bit old.

The latest version of Inkscape switches to using 96 dpi internally, as is the CSS standard.  This too might fix your size pasting issue.  One thing to be cautions of, all Inkscape SVG files made in older versions will give a warning when opened with the newer version, due to the 90 vs 96 dpi issue.  It gives you options to reset the viewbox, scale or ignore, while making a backup copy in the same directory.  Scale is usually the one you want.  But you should double check all sizes if you do this.

If you have an IRC client, point it to irc://irc.freenode.org/#inkscape.  This is the official Inkscape chat room.  Somebody there might know.  If you don't have a client, on the Inkscape web page is a web client, but it requires creating an account.  https://inkscape.org/en/community/discussion/

You could also convert all the text to paths.  It looses text edibility, but is more or less guaranteed to work.

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Thanks. The discrepancy is weird. If I don't change the page size in VM, it appears to paste fine but if I change it, the paste size changes.

But point taken on the Inkscape version. I will definitely try that and the saving as the plain SVG. I'll let you know how it goes.

Edit: Saving it as plain didn't help.

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OK, it's been a while but I upgraded to the latest version of inkscape (0.92) and I am seeing the same issues. This is with stock system fonts even.

The most important one is the issue with the fonts.

In addition, if I cut from Inkscape and paste into Vinylmaster, only one of the cut objects makes it. If I group the objects in inkscape first, they all come across.

This is with Vinylmaster Cut v4.0

Also, if I import the file, it is not to scale (like 1/4 of the linear dimension)

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One of the down sides of SVG is that it is open source and not strictly controlled. As a result different programs do slightly different things with the SVG format. The copy and paste is one of those that I've noticed. As you found, the only work around I've found as well was to group all the objects before pasting, in my case I was pasting into SignBlazer. The size was never correct either, but since the objects were all groups resizing them was not a big deal.

From the description of your text problem, sounds like text is another thing that Inkscape and VinylMaster handle slightly different. Did saving the file as a plain SVG make any difference? Inkscape can also save files off as eps, might try that then importing the eps into VM.

One other option, it is possible to cut straight from Inkscape. It's a very basic setup and you don't have all the various tools of a true cutting program, but it can be made to work, and it's pretty much all I use. Note, I only do decals as a hobby so I don't really need the various tools of a true cutting program.

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Saving as a plain SVG did not help any. if I had more time, I'd dig deeper myself. I'm not above hand-coding SVG for testing. I'm sure Inkscape does a few weird things (but likely has 1000% compliant SVG) but I'd like to stick with it as it fits well with my workflow. Previously I was using Make the Cut which works well with Inkscape but not with US Cutter. I'm not upset at moving on to Vinyl Master as it has some nice extra features but more compatibility is always better. It hasn't been a deal-breaker so far as I have been able to find work-arounds.

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