[scribus] PDF Export and Embedding Fonts

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:11:32 +0000
Hirwen HARENDAL <harendalh at hotmail.com> dijo:

> 
> > From: johnxj at comcast.net
> 
> > I'm sorry, I did not make something clear. The fonts that Scribus is
> > refusing to embed are Junicode Regular and FreeSerif Medium, both of
> > which are TrueType fonts. Both are also free open source fonts released
> > under the GPL. The document contains no OpenType fonts.

> - Open Scribus, but not any document.
> 
> - go to preference/fonts/
> 
> - remouve the cross in partial play (jeu in french) an see if the cross is
> in the square for postscript use.
> 
> - Open your document, make PDF, and embed fonts if they are in outlines
> in the windows PDF export.

Merci!

OK, I discovered something. All the fonts had the "Embed in PostScript"
box checked. But the two troublesome fonts (Junicode Regular and
FreeSerif Medium) had the Subset box checked. The Subset box was
unchecked for the other fonts used in the document.

I unchecked the Subset box for those fonts, closed Scribus, reopened
Scribus and the document. Then I exported as PDF and the two fonts in
question still came up in the Outline window, but this time I was able
to move them up to the Embed window. 

After exporting to PDF I opened the file in Adobe Reader. The file size
was still quite large and Reader still took several minutes to open it.
It also takes over a full minute to move to the next page. However, in
File > Properties > Fonts Adobe Reader said all the fonts were embedded.

So I have made some progress - at least I have managed to get the fonts
embedded. However, the speed issue remains. Something is wrong with the
way I am exporting to PDF:

(Note that the size of the Scribus file is 32 MB.)

Export from Scribus, PDF 1.4
	Embed fonts - file size is 117 MB, Reader is slower than
		molasses on display and printing 
	Outline fonts - ditto
	Uncheck "Compress Text and Vector Graphics" - ditto
	Uncheck "Embed PDF & EPS Files (EXPERIMENTAL) - ditto
	Change to PDF 1.5 - ditto

Print to CUPS-PDF
	No options at all, you can't even give it a file name. Adobe
Reader says no fonts in document. File size is 18 MB, screen display is
snappy, printing is glacial.

Print to PS, then use ps2pdf to create the PDF
	No options on print to PS, except at least you can specify a
file name. Screen display of the resulting PDF is snappy, printing is
still too slow, but a bit faster than producing the PDF via CUPS-PDF.
File size is 22 MB.

Another issue that I don't understand is "encoding" in Adobe Reader.
For all seven fonts used in the document (when embedded) Reader says
the encoding is "custom." All of the fonts are supposedly Unicode
compliant. I don't know where the "custom" came from or if it may have
something to do with the speed issues.

The real issue for me is print speed. I have far bigger and more
complex PDFs created from other programs that display and print just
fine. At this point I am not getting decent print speed out of PDFs
from Scribus whether I export from Scribus or print to CUPS-PDF or
print to PS. 

Any enlightenment or suggestions would be welcome.