[Scribus] pdf/x3

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 11:17, Louis Desjardins wrote:

> Please accept my cry from the heart : it's been so long I've read on 
> this list comments or reports on printers having trouble with PDFs I 
> just can't believe this. Anyone in the same situation, please, 
> please, ask your printer to update their system and get on the road. 
> I mean it, from a professionnal point of view.

Personally, I don't see how any company that can affort to own and run a
press can possibly consider newer versions of Acrobat a significant
expense. I suppose it's possible they have plugins that only work in
older versions and those plugins (eg for imposition) could cost much,
much more than Acrobat its self.

Even so, I just don't understand how any printers in countries where
multi-byte fonts are the norm can get away with Acrobat 4, given the
massive improvements made in 5 and even in 6. Despite this, people have
run into such printers several times.

> Be confident. You're not wrong. Scribus PDFs do print correctly. 
> Again.... Be confident.

It may be interesting to note that _all_ printing problem reports I've
seen personally (and there haven't been very many despite spending quite
a bit of time on IRC lately) involve printers with archaic software. I'd
be surprised if others' experiences didn't match that.

The most frequent seems to be with people trying to use ancient versions
of Acrobat to print 'wide' (multi-byte) TrueType fonts. This isn't
surprising given the  limited support for such fonts in older versions
of Acrobat, but it's easy to work around the recipient's crufty software
in Scribus by converting text to outlines before exporting. You can also
get nearly the same effect by enabling font subsetting.

--
Craig Ringer