[scribus] Scribus feature request--produce compressed PDF output

[Peter Nermander]

I am teaching Scribus to several people, most of whom use Microsoft
> Windows. In my own experience over the years, I have found that the PDF
> files created by Scribus are very large. I
>

There are valid reason for the size.

First and foremost, Scribus was created to be used to design for print (as
in printing magazines, books etc, not printing on your office laser
printer). A PDF for print has higher requirements than a PDF for
"distribution". In the printing industry large files are normal, the
printing industry was one of the major users of Iomega Zip drives (before
CD-RW became common), because of their need to transfer large files. I
think even today many printers accept originals on Zip disks.

One of the main reasons for the large size of a Scribus PDF is that each
glyph is placed by its own. Most other programs place the cursor at the
start of the line and print whole words or lines, but Scribus will place
the cursor accurately for each glyph. This means the PDF will contain A LOT
of cursor placement commands, and they occupy space.

Second, an embedded Open Type font can be 15-30 MB in size, a document with
10 embedded fonts will thus have 150-300 MB of fonts in it. And remember,
regular and bold counts as two fonts, since Scribus does not use "fake
bold".

And as Greg mentioned, high resolution images is of course one major
contributor to large files for printing.

So my opinion is of course that if you think the the files created by
Scribus are to big, maybe you are using the wrong tool?

It's not really the fault of the Scribus or its developers that there are
so few other programs for creating "simpler" PDF documents, but at least
Open/Libre Office can export directly to PDF and I think they are generally
smaller.


/Peter
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