[Scribus] Problems with text -> outline and EPS export

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi all,

I created a huge file designed as a plate (965 mmm x 965 mmm) for 
digital print. PDF creation went fine (as usual) and I went to the 
printer for a test drive.

At the printer, we had problems with Acrobat running out of memory 
(Acrobat loaded the ~ 8 MB file fine, but feel asleep while producing 
the final output) and we figured embedded fonts (three) as the most 
probable reason. The folks at the print shop told me this used to happen 
often with embedded fonts. I am used to produce output for print on 
paper, not plates, and my experience in that field is somewhat limited, 
so I went home and tried two different approaches:

No. 1: export to EPS. Unfortunately, the document is a bit complex 
(different layers, one of them with opacity set to 60%). I lost the 
opacity and the backgrund image didn't appear in the EPS. So I tried

No. 2: Converting all text to outlines. Now I lost all hyphens (the 
problem is not unique to scribus -- some vector programmes do the same). 
I went back to start, replaced all text frames turned to outline with 
real text and tried EPS again. Since then, scribus continues to crash 
with signal #6 every time I try to save as EPS (note 1: ghostscript is 
8.15; note 2: printing to file (PS) lets scribus crash too).

So what to do? I did an export to BMP with 2000 dpi and converted it to 
TIF. Maybe resolution will be high enough for the plate. And I did a 
second version (PDF) with all text turned to outline after inserting 
hyphens manually ([-], not [Ctrl]+[-]).

Any ideas for a better solution? Before filing a bug report for the 
hyphens/hyphenation problem, I think it's better to hear the opinion of 
others on the topic.

Christoph