[Scribus] Huge PDF file export :(

[Peter Linnell]

On Mon, 2003-05-19 at 04:20, Claus Paludan wrote:
> I am running Scribus 0.9.9 and the latest version of GhostSript. Last
> night I tried to create a pdf file - it contained 3 pics at 50kb in
> average and only one page of document. But the PDF file ended up
> between 3.5Mb and 9.5Mb depending on the settings in the pdf export
> pages.

What type of images ? TIFF PNG ? JPEG ? Resolution of images ? Which
distro ?

Ghostscript 7.06? or 8.0 ?

How many and what fonts ?  A single Unicode TTF font can be up to 5 Mb
and Scribus embeds fonts completely - for reliability. Did you target a
printer or screen ?

There are many variables to creating PDF which effect the size. There
are about 110 distilling parameters which are part of the PDF spec.  

IMO, Franz has done a masterful job of enabling advanced features
available only on the Full Acrobat Suite running on Win or Mac. At the
same time masking the complexities without "dumbing down" or limiting
quality, unlike other applications. 

I create dozens of PDF's a week with Scribus and have never had an issue
with "excessive" size. If the PDF is large, it is because I want a
"press-ready" PDF and then I am not concerned about size but quality.

Stuff that bloats a PDF:

Nested EPS within EPS files. (This also slows down display in Acro
Reader)
Many fonts in a doc.
Excessive resolution in images.
Scaling images down. 
Unneeded ICC profiles embedded in images.

Stuff that keeps PDF sizes slim:

Minimize usage of EPS for "screen" oriented (72-96 dpi) PDF's.
*Sometimes*, but not in all cases...

Convert TIFF's to PNG or JPEG at 72-96 dpi.

Use fonts which are already available with Acro Reader: Times,
Arial,Helvetica Courier etc and can be substituted by the reader.

Export directly from Scribus. ps2pdf from Ghostscript can do some weird
things to fonts, which display poorly. Depending on the options, can 
rasterize the type into bitmaps and print poorly. The pdfwrite device in
Ghostscript has some limitations. The Ghostscript team are devoting a
lot of effort to improving this in 8.x Ghostscript.

You can post a sample PDF, as well as the Scribus files, so that we can
inspect the files.  

 The collect to output makes this easy to then tar.gz up the directory.

Hope that helps,

Peter
-- 
Peter Linnell <scribusdocs at atlantictechsolutions.com>