[Scribus] Problem exporting chinese caracters in PDF

[Peter Linnell]

On Wed, 2004-04-28 at 17:48, Vladimir Zborowski wrote:
> Hello,
> First, thanks again for this amazing application. I'm using it regularly 
> for my personnal stuff and was dying to get an opportunity to use it at 
> work. Unfortunately, most of the time, the clients demand an Xpress 
> file. But this time, a job needs to be done with chinese text that 
> Xpress can't handle. I told them I might have a solution and made my 
> tests. Everything works perfectly in Scribus, except the PDF export : 
> the chinese caracters won't show up.
> I'm using Scribus 1.1.6 on Mandrake 10 community. The chinese font is AR 
> PL KaitiM GB Regular.
> I ask Scribus to embeded it in the PDF and it seems to be there but 
> under the name GBZenKai-Medium (as mentioned in  Acrobat 5).
> If anyone had an idea where could tell me where I should start to 
> investigate, that would be a great help. Should I (try to) upgrade to 
> the last CVS version ?
> Thanks a lot for your help.
> Vlad
> PS: the files I'm having trouble with are there :
> http://www.sladshot.org/scribus/Simple_chinese.pdf
> http://www.sladshot.org/scribus/Simple_chinese.sla
> http://www.sladshot.org/scribus/Simple_chinese.eps
> 

Well, I have figured out a work around:

Select the text frame and go Item > Convert to Outlines

Then export the PDF.

Results: 

The fonts are turned into postscript outlines and can be scaled etc.

Chinese and most Asian fonts are big to huge, owing to the number of
glyphs. Some Japanese Open Type fonts I have  are 8+ Mb, just for a
single font, compared to 50-300k for Latin or Unicode fonts. 

By converting the fonts to outlines, the PDF shrunk from 2.7 Mb to 158
kb.

>From what I can see, this should print perfectly, even on commercial
printing presses, but I can verify this in the next day or so sending it
to a RIP. I do not expect any issue, based on past experience.

As I know nothing about Chinese fonts, please have the client verify the
PDF under high levels of zoom. 

Chalk one up to Scribus, where the others have failed! While, this does
not mean Scribus fully supports Asian scripts, it does show it is more
capable sometimes than even we realize :-)

Cheers
Peter