[scribus] Problem with large exported PDF files

[Bill Wheaton]

Hello List: I'm a new user to Scribus.  Have been using it to lay out a photo book and I have some file size issues.  

I need to output the book to pdf to upload to the printing service.  Since the pdf is so huge, there's a tip on the printer's (viovio.com) website suggesting that ghostscript be used to knock down the file size to make it more manageable.  This all works fine until the size of the scribus-generated PDF file gets larger than 2GB.  At that point the ghostscript pass-through fails.  It happens consistently when the PDF is bigger than 2GB and never happens if the PDF is less than 2GB.  

I'm not sure whether the problem is with the PDF or with ghostscript, so I'm looking for help/troubleshooting advice.  If no one can identify a problem on the Scribus end, then I'll send inquiries to the ghostscript crowd next.

The ghostscript command will knock a 1.9GB PDF file generated by Scribus down to less than 300MB which is very helpful.  But any PDF bigger than 2GB fails when passed through ghostscript

Here's the setup:
Mac OS 10.6.2
Scribus 1.3.6
Ghostscript 8.71

Here's the ghostscript command:
gs-8.71-macosx -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dSAFER -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sstdout=%stderr -dGrayImageResolution=600 -dMonoImageResolution=1200 -dColorImageResolution=300 -sOutputFile=vol_iv_gs.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f vol_iv.pdf

Here's the error:

PL Ghostscript 8.71 (2010-02-10)
Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
   **** Warning:  An error occurred while reading an XREF table.
   **** The file has been damaged.  This may have been caused
   **** by a problem while converting or transfering the file.
   **** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.