Creating and editing PDFs in Inkscape is pretty simple. This quick tip will cover the basics of saving your Inkscape SVG to a PDF, as well as using Inkscape’s PDF import functionality.

Saving to PDF

Once you have your document or picture created in Inkscape, to save it as a PDF it is pretty simple. All you need to do is go to File > Save a Copy in the inkscape menus to bring up the Save a Copy dialog box. In this box, choose Portable Document Format (*.pdf) from the dropdown in the bottom right corner above the Save button.

Once you type in your filename, and click Save, the following dialog will appear giving you some options for the PDF export:

Here you can edit options for the PDF output like setting the version of PDF export, whether you want to embed fonts (or convert text to paths or curves), and whether you want to rasterize filter effects like blurs.

Once you click OK, your PDF will be exported and ready to use.

Opening a PDF

Importing / Opening an existing PDF into Inkscape is also quite simple. In the inkscape menu, go to File > Open, and open up the PDF, and the following dialog will be shown:

Here you can choose the options for the PDF import. The main option here is choosing which page to import — as inkscape can only do single page documents, you will need to choose the page of the PDF to import. Other options include using the alternative Poppler based import, and how to handle fonts import.