[scribus] To Outline Or Not To Outline?

[Mike Sleger]

I can't define "large" because the actual documents aren't in development yet - at this point they're only conceptual.  I would suspect the people having issues with a couple dozen pages probably don't have enough RAM.

OS X doesn't come with Acrobat Reader, but uses an application called Preview instead.  Unfortunately, Preview doesn't provide an option for displaying which fonts are contained within a PDF document.  However, after exporting with all six fonts in "Fonts to outline" (which is VERY misleading and should be corrected!), the resulting PDF text is indeed searchable in Preview.  I downloaded and installed Acrobat Reader for Mac and used it to check for embedded fonts, and guess what?  The fonts seem to be there, but didn't retain their names.  Instead of the actual font names (such as Eurostile LT Std Bold Condensed) they appear in Acrobat as Fo0S0, Fo1S0, Fo2S0, etc. (probably due to subsetting and how the exporting is coded?).  Without subsetting, the fonts have their proper names in Acrobat.  So it looks like you're right about fonts not being outlined, despite Scribus suggesting differently during export.  The PDF document size is 11.6 MB with subsetting and 39.5 MB without subsetting.  I expect the size differential will decrease as document size increases.

So, aside from smaller file sizes, are there any other benefits to subsetting?  I can see how if all you have is a title using a few characters you wouldn't want to embed the entire font, instead only the characters being used.  However, for large quantities of paragraph text, it seems embedding would be the better option.  On the issue of font name embedding, I like full embedding better.

On Jul 28, 2011, at 8:11 AM, a.l.e wrote:

> hi mike,
> 
>> I would hope that 8 GB is sufficient RAM for "large" documents.
>> 
> 
> you didn't define large...
> 
> but i guess that if scribus has 8GB available you should be able to manage a rather complex and long document...
> 
> i've read of people having done a 200+ pages with scribus, but other people already complain because of documents with a couple of dozen of pages...
> 
> you will have to test your case with some dummy content...
> 
> writing a detailed report after you've finished your work, will help other people to know where the limits of scribus are...
> 
> ciao
> a.l.e
> 
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