We now have two decent business card designs—but how do we actually get them printed? The best course of action depends on the nature of the design, and you must understand the current limitations of Inkscape and the capabilities of various output formats (Appendix B) to identify the best approach.
The first (“constructivist”) design does not have any transparency or gradients; it is a collection of fully opaque shapes. This means it can be saved without any quality loss as PostScript or EPS, which most print service providers will accept. To be on the safe side, preview your PS or EPS output file using Ghostscript.[8] Or, you can directly print such a file to your local printer device by the File ▸ Print command, which sends the PostScript rendition of the document to the printer.
For more complex designs, the best output format is PDF (B.3 PDF (Import, Export)). These days, nearly all print service providers accept PDF, often in preference to PostScript. PDF is a more powerful format by itself and it is better supported by Inkscape; with it, you don’t have to worry about gradients or opacity. Filtered objects—such as the initials with a drop shadow in our second design—will be automatically rasterized on export to PDF if you enable this option in the PDF export options dialog.
Generally, the safest strategy for preparing your design for print is to separate the necessarily vector elements from those that can be rendered into a bitmap. For example, text (especially using small-size fonts), logos, and crisp foreground shapes must remain vector; avoid using filters on them, but separate them into a foreground layer and convert all texts to paths so they do not depend on the availability of the fonts. Anything else (background shapes with or without transparency, filtered objects, imported bitmaps, etc.) can be collectively pre-rendered into a single bitmap with Make a Bitmap Copy: Set the desired resolution in Inkscape Preferences (Bitmaps page), select all the objects to rasterize, and press 
, after which you can delete or hide the vector originals. Thus, an “export-hardened” file—with best chances of being exported to PDF, imported into other programs, or printed without loss—would typically have just two layers: one with bitmap-like artwork rendered as one large bitmap and the other with vector-like artwork all in paths.
As a last resort, if even PDF doesn’t cut it, you can always just export the entire design as a bitmap. Inkscape can only export as PNG, but any number of other programs, from expensive Photoshop to the free GIMP or command-line ImageMagick, will convert a PNG to another bitmap format, such as the old (but still popular in the print world) TIFF.
Often, however, what you need to send to the print service provider is not just PDF or TIFF that faithfully reproduces the way your design looks on screen. Instead, you need your output to use device-specific CMYK or spot colors. While there’s some limited support for using color-managed display, you can’t export anything except the sRGB screen color space into any output format. Until this area is improved, you will need to use some other software to rectify this.
I have successfully imported Inkscape-produced SVG or PDF files into Adobe Illustrator in order to set a spot color for some objects, after which I resaved the file as PDF. With bitmap output, it is possible to create a device-specific CMYK file using only open source tools; first, convert the PNG exported from Inkscape to regular RGB TIFF, and then use the tifficc command-line utility from the LittleCMS library[9] to convert it to CMYK. You will need the ICC profile file of your target output device for this conversion.
If you print your cards on an office or home printer, most likely you will use the A4 or Letter paper format instead of the business card format. In that case it makes sense to print multiple copies per sheet and then cut it into separate cards. To prepare a printable file, group all objects of your card, then use the Create Tiled Clones dialog to create a 2×5 grid of clones of the group that will exactly fit on your printable page.
