[Scribus] PDF importing quality

[Gregory Pittman]

Craig Bradney wrote:
>> ----- 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.
>
>   
It may also be worth using pdftops to convert to postscript, in which 
case you import (File > Import > EPS/PS) rather than load into an image 
frame.

Greg