[Scribus] High quality export

[Craig Ringer]

On Sat, 2004-08-21 at 19:29, Elmar Jobs wrote:

> The print shop I have to use for a flyer requests the files as Quark or
> TIFF (PDF/X3 is no option).

If they have Photoshop, they can do a conversion to TIFF easily. So you
can you if you have it - see below. I find it hard to imagine that a
print shop would _not_ have Photoshop.

> So I tried to export my Scribus work as PNG
> to convert it to TIFF. The output should have 2900 pixels width (Scribus
> 1.1) or 350 dpi (1.2 - great work btw). The resulting file did have the
> right size but quality was obviously degraded (approx. 50-100 dpi), All
> original pictures have the correct resolution.

I'm seeing that as well with just-before-RC1 CVS. It looks like the text
is still rendered to screen dpi rather than the target DPI of the image.
I output a BMP (to make sure it wasn't a libpng related issue) at 4958 x
7017 (600dpi A4) and found that the text looked pixelated when the image
was displayed any larger than the original Scribus canvas had been. In
other words, the image looked fine if I scaled it to 72dpi, but at
original size or if scaled to (say) 150dpi it looked pixelated and
horrible. I have uploaded an extract to:

http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/~craig/files/c90276d1f4c5cbea1d6aaf478e33fcf5/pixelated.bmp.bz2

This was created by:
	New page
	Create text frame
	Insert sample text
	save as image
		type BMP, res 600dpi
	open in GIMP
	crop small chunk
	save chunk
	bzip2
	upload

> Is it possible to export in high quality? How?

If you have Adobe Photoshop to hand, you could always use it to
rasterise the EPS and save a TIFF. Simply open the PDF in Photoshop
(well, 6.x and 7.x at least) and it'll ask you what you want to do.
Photoshop does an incredible job of rasterising PDFs (IMHO) and lets you
control the colour space (B&W/RGB/CMYK) and resolution of the output.

Unfortunately, I've never got satisfactory results from using
GhostScript to rasterise PDFs to TIFF (though oddly, the JPEG output
seems a fair bit better).

--
Craig Ringer