[scribus] Concatenating PDFs - quality?

[john Culleton]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:22:16 +0100
Rolf-Werner Eilert <eilert-sprachen at t-online.de> wrote:

> Am 22.12.2011 18:52, schrieb Gregory Pittman:
> > On 12/22/2011 12:26 PM, Rolf-Werner Eilert wrote:
> >> Am 22.12.2011 15:06, schrieb Gregory Pittman:
> >>>
> >>> I just made a PDF of some vacation photos, for which I had to
> >>> break up the Scribus document so that I could work with them in
> >>> Scribus, then used pdftk to join them. The result was a >700MB
> >>> PDF, in which I saw no problems.
> >>>
> >>> Greg
> >>>
> >>>

>
> 
> Yes, I did read about this in the Wiki and played around with the 
> settings. The photos I use have "only" 6 Megapixels, ca. 2000 x 3000.
> I thought they should have 300 dpi at least to appear properly in the 
> print, do you agree?

> 
Yes


> 
> Sizing down each photo which is to appear somewhat smaller before 
> inserting it into Scribus is a lot of painful work, isn't it? Could
> this be achieved by Scribus itself?

Resizing photos in Scribus is easy. You adjust the graphic frame
to the size you want, right click on the photo and choose "fit
image to frame".

After that to adjust the DPI right click on the graphics frame, select
"Properties" and then  on the pop up menu select "Image".
Remember you can adjust dpi down but adjusting up is not likely
to yield good results. 

 (Haven't tried that yet, though
> there is a dialog which seems to do right that. But when I see that
> an untouched photo which appears in a smaller size on the page has
> merely 440 dpi, would it be worth to cut it down to 300 anyway?)
> 

See above. It is less than 30 seconds per photo to adjust the dpi
AFTER you have selected the final print size. 

> In Gimp, I found two dialogs which look like they could do that, but
> I don't know for sure how they actually work.
>
There are textbooks and tutorials for both Gimp and Scribus. I
advise everyone (including myself) to RTFM. 

> So I decided to go on with the creative part :-) and layout the pages 
> first and hoped to stay under the 300 MB limit.
> 

You can:
1. insert each photo at original resolution, 
2. resize the photo to the frame, 
3. then adjust the DPI to 300, 

...as described above.  Gimp is not required for these simple moves. 
-- 
John Culleton
Free list of books for self-publishers:
http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html

"Create Book Covers with Scribus"
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html