[scribus] Huge PDF, need suggestions

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 3 Sep 2009 19:04:08 -0400
John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> dijo:


> > Well, of course,... PDF 1.3 does not support transparencies...
> >
> > Craig

> Here is my solution:
> 1. Export the document as pdf 1.4 or pdf 1.5
> 2. View the pdf in Acrobat reader.
> 3. Print to file from Acrobat Reader, creating a postscript file.
> 4. Convert that file to pdf using Ghostscript script ps2pdf13.
> 
> Now you should have a smaller file with all the transparencies 
> preserved. 

John,

You are a genius, sir.

OK, I didn't follow your methodology exactly, but it led me to an even
simpler solution.

I could open the 1.4 or 1.5 file in Adobe Reader, although it took ten
minutes. The problem was printing. Whether printing to a printer or to
file, Reader could not do the job. I waited 45 minutes, but no output.
One CPU was running at or near 100% all the time and the amount of RAM
it was taking was changing a bit, so it was not locked up. It just
couldn't image the file.

I was going to try Okular next, but before doing that I decided to try
Evince. I rarely use Evince because its print options are not very
good. But when I tried the 1.4 and 1.5 files Evince opened them in a
couple of minutes. So I tried printing to PS file. Evince started to
spool the file very quickly, and it took only 25 minutes for the whole
132 pages.

However, there was a slight problem. Evince will print to file, but you
have an option to print to PDF file or to PS file. PDF is the default,
and I didn't see the option box before hitting the OK button. As a
result I printed the 1.4 file to a new PDF from Evince. I decided to
let it go ahead and finish. And when it was done I opened the resulting
PDF (69 MB v. 201 MB for the original 1.4 file) in Adobe Reader. Reader
opened it in about a minute. I looked at the pages with the grayscale
rectangles and they looked fine on screen. I printed them to a Laserjet
using the PCL driver and they came out exactly as they were supposed to.

So for future reference, it you use Evince you can accomplish the same
thing in one pass without having to write PS and then use ps2pdf to
convert it to PDF.

I have one remaining glitch with PDF export of this document, but it is
unrelated to the transparency issue so I'll post it in a new thread.