Re: Export to PDF?

[Alejandro Imass <aimass yabarana com>]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:47 PM, Peter Senna Tschudin
<peter senna gmail com> wrote:
> It is funny that nobody cares about my original question. So please
> focus on my question. Let's start again:

First of all you start by asking the correct question:

http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

> -- // --
> Are there any plans of making dia export to PDF? If not, can I ask it
> as a new feature?
> -- // --
>
> Now I'll add:
>
> -- // --
> If it is already a feature and it is not present in Fedora 19, what should I do?
> -- // --

You did not state up to this point that this particular feature was
not present in your Fedora version. I told you specifically that you
should have the Cairo option and you never answered saying it was not
available to you or not.

Since you mentioned Latex later on one of your answers I believe there
are far better options to embed your images in a Latex document than
using  embedded PDF. That is exactly what EPS (if you want to maintain
vector), SVG, PNG and other more embedded formats are for. Using PDF
is not the most optimal way because PDF was designed for another
purpose, namely printing much like plain'ol PostScript.

PDF and PS __are not__ graphics file formats and should not be used
for embedding because their are targeted to a page, not a predictable
bounding box. EPS is exactly designed for this task[1], but most Latex
nowadays will support PNG and many other graphics formats. PDF is
actually the worst choice for this task because "Each PDF file
encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document,
including the text, fonts, graphics, and other information needed to
display it."[2]

Nevertheless if you are using pdflatex (which you don't mention
either) it does not support EPS which is actually very stupid IMHO,
but teTeX distribution includes a tool, epstopdf, to convert EPS files
to PDF. pdflatex notwithstanding does support JPEG and PNG directly,
but scaling, anti-aliasing and choice of export font requires some
additional effort to get right.

You can also use EPS directly in your LaTex doc by following by using
DeclareGraphicsRule much like the recipe here:
http://chi3x10.wordpress.com/2009/06/18/eps-and-pdflatex-no-more-converting-eps-to-pdf/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

Best,

-- 
Alejandro Imass