[Scribus] Image compression in PDF export

[PLinnell]

On Wednesday 05 April 2006 00:02, Calum Polwart wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 15:16 -0600, Wolfgang Dobler wrote:
> > I think the PDF export dialog could need some improvements to
> > make production of web-oriented (i.e. compact) PDF easier.
>
> Likewise - I think it positions every character on the page not a
> complete text line.  Great for print accuracy but hugely expensive
> on memory/filesize.  It is REALLY common these days to produce
> stuff for print and then stick a copy on a web site for download...
> its a shame that there is no option to switch off this level of
> positioning for web export where screen viewing will be the norm
> and a tiny variation in line spacing might not matter,...  (I
> believe printing to ps and then converting to pdf using GS somehow
> magically resolves this... perhaps the same may be true for the
> up-sampling of images, and compression methods - I can't test as my
> print to PDF is broken.).  I'm producing a 32 page A5 document with
> a few photo's (cover in colour [does it put the whole document in
> colour?]) and I average 30-60Mb Print Ready version, even on low
> resolution I rarely get below 5Mb, but if I 'optimise' it in
> windows I can get down to <1Mb which is far more acceptable for the
> web...
>
> Should I also file that as an enhancement? - What for:
> - Reducing positioning accuracy to lines of text instead of
> characters (would also have advantage of easier selecting text?)
> - Exporting only pages with colour on them as colour?  IS that
> possible in PDF? Perhaps it doesn't matter... scribus might already
> do it - I tried testing it and can't see that it doesn't, but it
> used to cause me problems with MS Pub when B&W pictures were still
> saved in 24bit colour MS Pub sent them to the PDF printer as 24bit
> colour?  Exporting Gray Scale seems to make big differences to my
> document sizes even though only 2 of 32 pages are in colour...?
>
> Calum

There are already bugs filed for this and an extensive discussion of 
this on the mailing list before. 

Fixing this to allow text streams in the PDF to make them 'less 
precise' requires some major changes in the PDF exporting code and 
depend on other code changes being done first. 

However, our priority has always been and will trouble free 
printing/separation. 

Peter