[Scribus] pdf woes

[Franky Van Liedekerke]

On Mon, 25 Aug 2003 18:52:10 -0400
tech at atlantictechsolutions.com wrote:

> >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. 

hmm .. probably because the image in the template was not included. Did
you try to change the template (called HLWMold) so the image it uses is
found on disk again? Then the first page will be much bigger, though the
template is not used on the first page.

> >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 

then I hope winblows acroread opens it fine, because that's what I give
to the printer shop (the doc is b/w, so color management is a bit
useless here, that's why I give them an easy-to-use pdf file)

> >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. 

nope, just the plane "export LDFLAGS=-lm;./configure;make;make install"
I'll mail a list of the fonts installed this evening, but iirc I only
installed the extra fonts mstcorefonts from sourceforge. I installed
http://sourceforge.net/projects/corefonts/, but maybe I should use
http://sourceforge.net/projects/font-tool/ ?
Is there a debugging options for scribus? Or maybe I'll need to search
for a coredump ...

> >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.

ah, ok. tx!

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

great! :)