[Scribus] File size using photos

[Henry Hartley]

Nigel Ridley wrote:
>> 
>> This is really a newbie question but I would really like to know:
>> Does Scribus only use the part of a photo/graphic that is viewable
>> in the graphic frame or does the whole photo/graphic get put into
>> the end file size regardless of how much has been cropped out.
>> Is that clear? If not - let's say I have a 2.5Mb .jpg that I put
>> into a Scribus document. I then crop the .jpg as I only want a
>> section of the photo in the finished document - is there still
>> 2.5Mb of .jpg in the document?
>> 
>> The reason I'm asking is that I want to make a small booklet
>> available on my website for download but obviously want to keep
>> the file size down to something reasonable (there will probably
>> be several graphics in the finished document).

It appears that the final PDF will have the entire image in it.  To test
this I created three files.  In the first I created a 2" by 2" image
frame and put a largish (5,051,059 byte, 2,448 by 3,264 pixel) image
into that frame.  I scaled the image to fit in the frame.  Of course, it
left some empty space in the frame but I don't care at this point.  I
saved this file and created a PDF, using default settings.  The PDF file
is 5,052,811 bytes in size, which seems pretty reasonable given the size
of the image.

Then, I created a second file with the same 2" by 2" image frame and put
the same largish image in it.  This time, however, I scaled the image so
it was cropped to 300dpi in the frame.  Obviously a 600 by 600 pixel
portion of the image was now visible in the frame.  I saved this one, as
well and created a PDF.  The PDF is 7 bytes larger than the one
generated by the first file, 5,052,818 bytes.

Finally, I opened the image in GIMP and cropped out a 600 by 600 pixel
area from about the same part of the image as in test 2 above.  I
created a third Scribus document with the same image frame, put this
image into it and scaled it to fit.  This time, the PDF document is
considerably smaller, 112,159 bytes.  So, if file size is important and
if you plan on using only a portion of a large image (or portions of
many images, even if they aren't that large) you are better off,
possibly much better off cropping them to their final size before
importing them into your document.

For all I know, changing the PDF creation settings from the defaults may
give considerably different results and might make cropping first
unnecessary.  If it were me and I really cared I'd do some more testing.

-- 
Henry