I have a PDF, made with Inkscape, that uses transparent colors. This image shall be used in a LaTeX document.

While preserving the transparency is nice for editing, it can be a problem for printing. Printing usually involves PDF to PS conversion. Since Postscript does not support transparency, this requires either

• flatting, i.e. creating a vector graphic that works without transparency

or

• rastering, i.e. rendering a bitmap image.

When a PDF document containing such a figure is printed (or converted to PS) using Evince (or Cairo or Ghostscript), the whole page gets rendered as a bitmap, rendering fonts ugly (different from other pages). (Adobe Acrobat handles such PDFs well.)

Unfortunately, converting the PDF figures to EPS (before including them with LaTeX) doesn't help much, because both pdftops and pdf2ps (again, Cairo or Ghostscript) rasterize the image, i.e. render a bitmap (saved as EPS). (This is slightly better, because it doesn't affect the whole page, but I'd still prefer a vector graphics.)

How can I flatten transparency with Inkscape or other software on Linux?