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Abhimanyu
Asked: 2014-09-28 00:16:07 +0800 CST

Inkscape: How can I make a multi-paged document in it?

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I've picked Inkscape as a replacement of CorelDRAW on my Windows. It's free, so of course there have to be a few backdrops in face of its mighty ability to create perfect XML code for images. However, suppose I want to create a 10-paged documentary on Indian politics. Or anything. Now, how do I do it?

Making a folder and saving each page separately as an .svg file would be messy. So my question is this:

How can I, given that I can in the first place, make a multi-paged document with Inkscape? Even if the answer is "No, you can't," please say so in an answer.

inkscape

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Today there is no native multi-page support in Inkscape due to limitations of the strictly implemented SVG specifications (multi-page support was only introduced in SVG 1.2. draft which was never released but dropped in favour of the upcoming SVG 2.0).

    To overcome this an external plugin inkscape-pages provides multi-page support through generating a master page with links to subpages. However this plugin will not produce SVG 2.0 code for future compatibility. Nevertheless it will help creating multiple pages for later export to PDF (e.g. with the help of pdftk Install pdftk ).

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  2. If there are not many pages, try saving them as separate single page PDF files after editing with Inkscape and then merge using some tool like PDF fill. I do not know if it may lead to some problems later, but it worked for me when I tried with 3 PDF files.

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  3. I wrote a tool that generates a multi-page PDF from your Inkscape document; it uses the common trick of "layers as pages". I call it ink2pdf, get it here: https://github.com/spook/ink2pdf .

    It also allows conditional tags and custom layer-to-page mapping simply by how you name the layers. Hope it helps!

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  4. One trick is to make a huge page as tall as the number of pages you need in Inkscape. Make sure sections are equal in height, this can be done by copy/pasting a rectangle next to the page area for reference like shown in following screenshot:

    Example Inkscape setup

    Then, you can export a .png with a high resolution as usual and use a poster creation tool, such as PosteRazor, which you can install with:

    sudo apt-get install posterazor

    Start it with this command (note the capital letters):

    PosteRazor

    Follow the instructions in PosteRazor. Some key points:

    • Set margins and overlaps to 0
    • Set the page size to custom and put the dimensions of your reference rectangle in Inkscape (units don't matter, it's only for scale)

    PosteRazor can be replaced with mupdf and other alternatives which you can find in this unix stackexchange question.

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