[Scribus] PDF importing quality

[Craig Bradney]

> ----- Original Message -----
> Subject: [Scribus] PDF importing quality
> From: Ville Aakko <ville.aakko at gmail.com>
> To: scribus at nashi.altmuehlnet.de
> Date: 05-11-2007 8:51
> 
> 
> Hi!
> 
> I'm using Scribus to create a private book for a group of people. The
> book will have advertisement to cover the printing costs. Most
> advertisers send their ads in PDF format (containg both text and
> iamges). The size of the advertisements ranges from 210x297 mm to a
> qurter (105x148mm) of an A4 page. The problem is, that the PDF
> "importing" of scribus is of unacceptable quality - either that, or,
> I'm not using it properly.
> 
> If I've understood correctly, Scribus currently only converts PDFs to
> a bitmap image. But Scribus uses a resolution that is way too little
> for any real use - it seems that usually at maximum I can get 72 DPI,
> when the printing job will be 300 DPI! If I create a PDF from scribus
> to be given to a print house, the quality from the imported PDF's is
> noticeable degraded even on my computer screen (compared to the
> original material)! Also, I noticed that for some reason Scribus
> creates images of slightly different sizes from individual PDF files,
> but still roughly only 1/4 of the resolution that would be needed.
> 
> Now, is there a way to control how large images Scribus creates from
> the imported PDF's? Or is there an utility, which I can use to create
> bitmaps of certain size, to be imported in to Scribus?
> 
> Scribus is a nice project indeed, but IMHO poor support for PDF
> importing is the major flaw, and seems to be the showstopper for me.
> Around here, PDF seems to be the de facto format for transferring
> material to be printed from patrons (though, I do think that a lot of
> people could claim that is shouldn't be).
> 
> Hope Scribus gets bettter support for PDF in the near future! In the
> meantime, does anyone got any workarounds for the problem?

Completely untrue. Scribus just renders an image generated by ghostscript. I
have often used 1200 dpi PDFs exported from OpenOffice.org for example, to
import large tables. The only issue is Scribus imports just the first page
of a PDF, but this is easily worked around by exploding the PDF into single
pages if required with something like pdftk.

Craig