Import PDF in Inkscape without replacing fonts

latex

Published

December 12, 2013

Import PDF in Inkscape without replacing fonts

Inkscape replaces text in PDF with bad fonts (especially when the PDF is generated with latex). I use Inkscape to rearrange some stuff or do some fine-tuning of a pstricks-images. Sometimes I just want to reset the bounding box (crop the PDF) without losing the PDF format. The solution is hidden in this blog post:

Run the PS file filename.ps through gs to replace the fonts with outlines like so

gs -sDEVICE=pswrite -dNOCACHE -sOutputFile=- -q -dbatch -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET filename.ps -c quit | ps2pdf - "`echo filename.ps | cut -f1 -d'.'`"-nofont.pdf

to generate filename-nofont.pdf.

This file can be imported and used in inkscape (but you can't re-type the text, obviously).