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Making a poster using Inkscape

Inkscape turned out to be great for making my Vancouver poster. The following things were not so great
  1. Export to pdf is bloated. My poster on export came to 303 MB(!). Using the 'reduce file size' option in acrobat resulted in a 2.3 MB file. Obviously Inkscape is doing something screwy here.
  2. Export to pdf does not honor image clipping. I was using rectangles to mark out a part of an image (an equation screen shot from latex pdf output) and the clip the image. The clipping worked fine in SVG, but when exported to pdf the entire figure was visible, not just the clipped part.
  3. Obviously, I was doing this because Inkscape does not have good equation support. There are two plugins that use pstoedit to convert latex dvi output to svg, but I could not get it to work on my windows machine.
I just learnt about Scribus, and wonder if that would be a better poster making tool
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