[scribus] Problem with large exported PDF files

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Donnerstag, 19. August 2010, 13:54:30 schrieb 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.

Hi Bill,

I'm not sure about the gs side of things, but how on earth did you manage to 
create a PDF of that size? I assume you used a lot of high-resultion images, 
which is probably unnecessary, especially since you mentioned a book. Try to 
scale down the images to 300 dpi.

HTH

Christoph