[Scribus] Slow Rendering PDF exported from scribus

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 12:48:21AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

> OK. That makes sense then. It sounds like they were possibly linearized
> either on output, or by Acrobat later. This is sometimes called
> "optimize for web view".

Five minutes on Google would've told me that won't help. Sorry.

> On a side-note, I'm astonished to hear of some of the rendering times
> reported here. For example, I've always found Acrobat Reader 6 / 7 on
> Mac OS X just fine with rendering times. Acrobat 4 / 5 under Mac OS 9 is
> another matter ...  so slow it hurts.

I was only able to see what everybody's taking about by firing up
Acrobat Reader on my 150MHz laptop. That said, I see what you mean. The
two key features are:

  - Text is rendered in small chunks, each of which takes a little while
    to draw.
  - Rendering is highly out-of-order

I don't know enough about PDF to explain the first point, but I *have*
seen it before, and from Quark+Acrobat documents at that. Maybe Franz or
Peter will have some thoughts on that. If I had to make a wild guess
it'd be that we're breaking up text into small stretches to get the
desired positioning (workarounds for older / buggier PDF viewers and
RIPs, IIRC). Maybe to improve print reliability?

Personally, I'm wondering if Acrobat has some optimizations for text
done certain ways, and the Scribus text is forcing it to fall back on
its default slow-but-comprehensive rendering.

-- 
Craig Ringer