[Scribus] Q: flattened PDFs

[D. R. Evans]

I am having problems with a lack of consintency in lulu's printing of
covers generated by Scribus.

It think it has to do with the fact that I was using the Scribus default of
PDF 1.4. Switching the output to PDF 1.3 seems (so far) to have solved the
consistency problem.

But... that means that I lose the ability to use gradients.

Is there any way to have Scribus generate a flattened PDF? I think this is
also what is meant by a "rasterized" PDF; there are warnings on lulu's site
about using layers and they say that rather than submitting a PDF with lots
of layers, one should pre-rasterize the PDF by opening it in Photoshop,
which can "rasterize the [PDF] file to a single layer". Presumably, one
could by this method rasterize a PDF 1.4 file and generate something that
can have gradients AND is rendered properly every time by lulu's printers,
since it would contain just one layer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is taking forever to debug,
since each iteration takes about a week (and costs about $10). And I'll
soon have a bunch more Scribus-generated covers that will have to go
through the same process :-(

  Doc Evans