"exported area is the drawing" and "exported area is the page" aren't alternative in export

confirmed, for the 4 possible states of the checkboxes, there are only two outcomes.
- "drawing" box checked, and both boxes checked, both lead to the same outcome.
- "page" box checked, and neither box checked, both lead to the same outcome
- therefore radio buttons would be more appropriate

I noticed this as well (prior to finding this bug) and went off to fix it. The initial wording of the two checkboxes along with the pairing of the "Limit export to the object with the ID" option confused the heck out of me as to what they actually did as initially I thought they controlled what was being output. Instead they control the output's bounding box. Fixing this is fairly easy and I have a patch that does so but I think we need more than a straightforward conversion to radio boxes -- we need new wording for them too.

My current thought is something along the lines of:

Output page size:
o Retain document's page size
o Shrink page size to exported objects

Thoughts?

I see that this would need to be changed for PDF and EPS. I wasn't able to find that option for DXF or other format but if you can point me to them I'll look at those too.

In Inkscape 0.48.2 r9819 (on Linux Ubuntu 11.10) there are still check boxes for that. (I tested EPS and PS export.)
Radio buttons would be clearer.

I find the new wording quite nice. (Not sure what the current Englisch wording is.)
The current German translation reads pretty ambiguous:
"Exportierter Bereich ist die gesamte Zeichnung"
"Exportierter Bereich ist die gesamte Seite"
(I never know which of the two resulting BoundingBoxes will be smaller.)

On the other hand, for eps currently it does not matter which checkbox is checked, see bug #380501. It will always export "drawing".
If there are radio buttons/check boxes they should work.

Patch to convert the checkboxes into radio buttons.
Logic of those selections should be unchanged.

Modified to the wording slightly, to keep the grammar consistent :

Output page size
* Use documents page size
* Shrink to exported objects size

Thanks for this patch!

I'm not an English native speaker, nor a programmer, but I think it should be:

Output page size
* Use document's page size
* Shrink to exported object's size

We don't export multiple documents/objects(=no plural s), but the (page) size is "owned" by the original document/exported object (=possessive case).

On the other hand I'm not sure how to escape an apostrophe in a patch file. Would \' be correct?
"<option value=\"page\">" N_("Use document\'s page size") "</option>"

> * Shrink to exported objects size

The drawing content can also be larger than the page size (in this case, the exported area expands…)

Thanks for the comments, wording amended to :

Output page size
* Use document's page size
* Use exported object's size

(Apostrophe can be added as-is inside a double-quoted string).

Tested on Windows XP, Inkscape revision 11649.

Attached is a slightly modified patch that applies the changes to the PDF export dialog, removes the comments and fixes some tabs/spaces formating issues.

v3 patch committed to trunk as r11654

Thanks stephan, ~suv for your input, and JazzyNico for the improved patch !

Late comment about the changes in r11654:

To me the current wording in trunk is confusing (caveat: English is not my native language - possibly I miss a grammatical subtlety in the use of the apostrophe (?)):

---
 [x] Use document's page size
 [ ] Use exported object's size
 Limit export to object with ID: [ ___ ]
---

One could easily read this as if "Use exported object's size" only works in combination with "Limit export to object with ID" because both use the singular form "object". The settings however are not connected:
- a single object can be exported either with page size or the object's size,
- with no ID specified, the option "Use exported object's size" (formerly called "Export area is drawing") refers to all objects (plural) in drawing (including those outside the page).

The term 'Drawing' is used elsewhere in Inkscape to describe the same area (e.g. Export Bitmap, Document Properties > Page) - it's not really clear to me why it ought to be changed for PS/EPS and PDF export into referring to a _single_ object.

The changes in r11654 possibly introduced a regression when exporting to pdf via command line interface:
Bug #1059132 “--export-pdf crashes with inkscape trunk "
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1059132>

Bug #1059132 has been set to "Fix Released", so the regression should be gone.