[Scribus] pdf woes

[tech at atlantictechsolutions.com]

At Mon, 25 Aug 2003 23:46:40 +0200 , Franky Van Liedekerke <liedekef at pandora.be> wrote: 

>Hi all,
>
>I'm having some issues related to PDF creation here. In all cases, the
>"official" 1.0.1 version is used.
>
>1) size issues:
>I have a document of 14 pages (so not that big) and if I print out the
>first page only to PDF, it's size is 19,8 MB (with only one line of text
>on it).


I took your bad.sla and got a 347kb PDF without compression. 198.5 kb with compression. 

>Now if I take the same page in a seperate document (either by doing new
>document-> import or by editing the sla file and removing all other pages)
> and generate a pdf out of it, it's size is 290 KB (and the dcument
>contains all the same fonts).
>In attachment you can find the good and the bad sla files (gzipped). The
>difference between the 2 is that the "bad" sla file has a template in it,
>which is used on pages 2 till 14, but not on page 1, which was used for
>printing. Removing the image from the template created almost equal pdf
>files in both cases, so it might be that this is all normal ... Would
>"compress text and vector graphics" resolve this as well?

It never hurts to enable this. 


>
>2) in attachment you can find a ghostscript error when trying to view pdf
>files generated from either of the included sla files. As you can see, it
>fails to read them, while xpdf has no problem at all. Again it seems to be
>a font issue? Ghostscript version is the standard up-to-date redhat 9.0
>version (7.0.2 iirc).

Fails on gs 7.07 (built as a RH RPM) and GS View 4.4 as well.  

Acro 5.0.7 opens it perfectly. 

One of the things Ghostscript 7.x does not do well is use platform and embedded fonts the way Xpdf and Acro Reader do. The AFPL GS 8.x versions have had some work to correct this. 

I'll be curious if this works or not with GS8 


>
>3) instability: sometimes (1 out of 5 times) scribus crashes when trying
>to generate a pdf file, sometimes it generates pdf files of 200 MB and
>more and crashes then ... unreproducable btw  :-(

That is quite unusual. Even with bleeding edge CVS code and knowingly broken files, the PDF exporter has never ever crashed unless I completely ran out of ram and swap. This is since the 0.5+ series. This is on RH from 7.2-9. 

This suggests some sort of problem with the compile or corrupted fonts. Did you compile -with-enable-final ? In testing with Scribus, this has caused some stability issues. 


>
>4) fonts used: it seems the sla file contains a reference to all fonts
>once used it the doc, even if they're not used any more (see included sla
>files as an example). It would be nice if this got cleaned up so when you
>do "embed all fonts" you only embed the fonts actually used.
>

There is code in Scribus which prevents unused fonts from being embedded in the PDF. I have tested this extensively since it was put in by Franz and it works. 

You can verify this in Acrobat Reader by File > Document Properties > Fonts. Then click List all fonts. Acrobat Reader will parse the whole file looking for fonts. In your file, Arial MT was embedded correctly. 




>5) And a small feature request: a progress bar when printing to pdf
>(and/or ps) would be nice ...

On the list.


Hope that helps,
Peter