[scribus] Problem with large exported PDF files

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Freitag, 20. August 2010, 00:42:17 schrieb 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

Hi Bill,

Please try the following: Export from your source file to several smaller PDF 
files (e.g., 1--30, 31--60 etc.). Then shrink each file with gs and join the 
resulting files with pdftk.

Christoph