[Scribus] "Nice" PDF

[Tino Schwarze]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 08:11:10PM -0700, Wolfgang Dobler wrote:
> Being sent out via e-mail, the newsletter _must_ be below ~ 1 MB,
> desirably even smaller. Since the Scribus options for minimizing the size
> (subsetting fonts and downsampling images) did not meet that requirement
> (I'd need to try again to give figures), I looked for a route to
> PostScript and back to PDF that would give better compression, and the
> following does a surprisingly good job:
> 
>   1. Export as PDF, embedding all fonts, no font subsetting, no image
>      subsampling
>      --> newsletter_scribus.pdf [~2.8 MB]
>   2. Convert to PS using `pdftops -level3' (Acroread 7's PS export will
>      _not_work)
>      --> newsletter.ps [huge]
>   3. Convert back to PDF using ghostscript (subsetting fonts, subsampling
>      images; this must be ghostscript 8.x or later)
>      --> newsletter_compact.pdf [~500 kB]

I've had a similar experience when I made a poster (using "poster") and
the PDF made from the poster.ps was _smaller_ (about 4 times IIRC) than
the source PDF even though "poster" simply copies the input PS file 4
times into the output file, so I expected the file size to grow by
factor 4. 

gs seems to do a pretty good job at converting PS to PDF!

Bye, Tino.