[scribus] Placing /Scaling and file image/PDF size

[Gregory Pittman]

Mike Breiding wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> It has been slow going for me but I think I am getting where I need to 
> be for what I want to do.
>
> I have been struggling with getting images to fit to frames without 
> cropping. I just realized I should be using "Scale to frame size" 
> "Proportional" in the Properties/Image dialog.
> I must have changed it previously to "Free Scaling" and thus the 
> problems with sizing the images.
>
> Now that I know that what I am wondering is this: when the image is 
> scaled to fit the frame, does it reduce the image file size to reflect 
> the newly scaled size?
> The reason I ask this is I am concerned about using full size images 
> and thus bloating the size of the PDF and also slowing screen refreshes.
>
> Any thoughts on this?
There are a lot of thoughts on this.
No, it does not reduce the image file size. Scribus just has a "pointer" 
(to use a computer term) to the file location, regardless of how much of 
the image and at what resolution Scribus is using it. Furthermore, it 
loads the entire file into RAM. So  the size of the image, the number of 
images, the size of your RAM (+ swap in the case of Linux) all interact 
to potentially be a problem. Scribus needs the whole file when it 
generates a PDF or prints directly.

For something small, with only a few images, it's usually not an issue. 
After you use Scribus for awhile, you will get a sense of when to be 
concerned. OTOH, if you are loading a multi-MB image and only using a 
small piece of it, you would be wise to crop it (outside of Scribus) and 
use the cropped version.

Greg