With yEd 3.9.2, PDF export seems to have rendering issues.

Question

I recently updated to yEd 3.9.2 - thank you for PDF "automatic page settings". :o)

When exporting to PDF, there seem to be some rendering issues. Some Nodes/Elements arent rendered at all, most of them are only partly rendered. Tested with Adobe Reader 9.5.1 and evince 3.2.1 (Ubuntu 11.10, x64).

The issue seems to be related to color gradients.

SVG & PNG export work fine. Gnome image viewer, eog (v3.2.1, Ubuntu 11.10 x64), seems to have some issues with color gradients as well. Still, Firefox renders those SVG exports correctly.

Example .graphml & expots:

http://www.filedump.net/index.php?pic=yed392exports1342001408.zip

http://www.filedump.net/dumped/yed392exports1342001408.zip

Regards, Linus

Answer 1

Yes, yEd's PDF export cannot handle gradients. That is a known short-coming. The really bad news is that FreeHEP VectorGraphics (the library used for PDF creation in yEd) is no longer maintained by its creators. In other words, the situation will not improve any time soon.

By the way - thank you very much for the link to the example. Examples always help tremendously to understand a problem.

Comments

There's actually a way around yEd PDF export problems.

You can export to SVG, as this export seems to fully work. Then you can use Inkscape (or any other good vector graphics editor) to export as a PDF.

I tried with the example linked, and it worked nice.

Hope this can help somebody.

Answer 2

I tried going the "Export to SVG" -> "Convert to PDF" route. Unfortunately, every app I tried for converting the SVG to PDF also had gradient problems!

What I finally did was: export to PNG with custom height of 2000, then embed the PNGs in a PDF (using Latex nd TikZ).

It would have been nice to specify the dpi setting instead of a custom height/width when exporting to PNG. Then different diagrams would get the same text size.

Anyway, thans for the great diagramming tool!

Comments

I am curious, what do you gain by embedding a PNG raster image into a PDF document? After all, this will not convert the raster image into a vector graphic. Thus the PDF document with the embedded raster image will now suffer from all the drawbacks of using raster images in the first place (i.e. the document/image cannot be scaled without loss of data).
Do not get me wrong - I think exporting to PNG is the right approach if you have SVG nodes with gradients. I am just wondering why you embedded the exported image into a PDF document.

Aside from the above, yEd's PDF export has been slightly improved since version 3.9.2. While it still cannot handle gradients defined in SVG documents, it is now able to handle the simpler gradients from shape nodes, flowchart nodes, and ERD nodes.