[scribus] Problem with large exported PDF files

[Bill Wheaton]

Hi Christoph--  Thanks for the reply.

The original input files are, in total, about 500MB.  They are jpegs. There are about 150 of them.  One per page.  There's no text, just 1 photo per page.  In scribus, I set the the resolution of every photo to about 300dpi.   Scribus properties for each image shows Actual X-DPI and Actual Y-DPI of 300 to 330 depending on the photo.

I figure gs will resample down to 300, so I wasn't too worried about the 330dpi.  I do not know why Scribus makes a 2GB PDF file.  

If there is another way that I should be specifying 300dpi for each image in Scribus, please let me know.

I'm exporting to PDF 1.5 (Acrobat 6).  I've tried setting colors for Screen/Web and Printer.  The Printer option makes even larger PDF files (about 2.5GB as compared to 2GB for screen/web).

Bill


On Aug 19, 2010, at 4:50 PM, Christoph Schäfer wrote:

> 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