[scribus] pdf problems

[avox]

michael crane-2 wrote:
> 
> 2009/2/27 Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com>:
> ...
>>>
>>
>> I don't understand this making of PDFs then importing to Scribus. This
>> makes
>> no sense. Perhaps if you can explain what you have in mind when you are
>> doing this, we can come up with some suggestions on how to do this in a
>> sensible way. The PDF is supposed to be the end product of your work, not
>> some in-between working stage than gets reincorporated back into Scribus.
> 
> I made a flyer in scribus that looked ok on screen. then exported to
> pdf to send to the printer guys.
> hopefully end of story. pdf looked as expected in adobe reader but
> then I opened the pdf that scribus had made back into scribus and the
> graphics were missing and some coloured text was the wrong colour.
> I opened it in inkscape and everything was there but the text was the
> wrong face and the graphic had some garbage lines in places.
> in photoshop the whole background was transparent.
> and so I think I must have done something wrong and I have spent the
> last day trying to find out what is a pdf, what might be the reason
> for these "errors" and trying different ways of importing the
> graphics, adding/removing masks to make transparent, as png, as tiff
> as jpeg. exporting the file with different options "which pdf" etc
> as I said  this is kind of new to me as I haven't talked to a printer
> for over 15 years but I need to know that what I send is going to end
> up as I would like.
> 

Greg already answered about how to do it right, I just want to give some
background
on what happened when you opened those PDFs.
PDF is a complex format that holds text, vector graphics, bitmpas and more.
It's
not intended to be an editable format but something like "electronic paper".
Nevertheless there have been attempts to convert PDFs back to editable
format.
None of that works very well, let alone faithfully. Inkspace and OpenOffice
nowadays
allow opening PDFs. Scribus can import Postscript and EPS graphics using the
ghostscript program. That same trick works as well for PDFs, but with not so
good
results, as you saw when you opened the PDF with Scribus. Therefore we dont
advertise
this feature. Opening a PDF in Scribus is very much like feeding a cut+paste
paper collage
with several layers into the automatic sheet feeder of a xerox machine...

The way to place PDFs inside a Scribus document is to create an image frame
and attach
it to the PDF file. Scribus will do a pretty good job in reproducing that
PDF in the final result.

About transparency: there's on/off transparency as realized with stencil
masks and clippaths
and there's alpha-transparency with translucent images. The first one is
supported by all
versions of PDF and Postscript, the second only from PDF 1.4 onward. That's
why you get
warnings from Scribus if you use that kind of transparency.

/Andreas
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