[scribus] Making PDF smaller

Rolf-Werner Eilert eilert-sprachen at t-online.de
Tue Sep 7 16:05:17 CEST 2010


Am 07.09.2010 15:48, schrieb John Culleton:
> On Tuesday 07 September 2010 09:31:47 Bo Engborg wrote:
>> This seems to be one of the most asked questions. Is it not worth
>> to include pdf shrinking in Scribus? Not everyone (like myself)
>> will find it easy to install a couple of extra programs and work at
>> the command line.
>>
>> - Bo E -
>
>
> Can you type:
> cd /mydirectory
> pdf2ps foo.pdf
> ps2pdf foo.ps
> ?
> Of course you can. Anyone who can do that much typing can use the
> command line. And anyone who can write an email should have no trouble
> with that much typing.  The only difference between Linux or Mac OS on
> the one hand and MSWin on the other is whether you use a \ or a / to
> define a directory.
>
> I use Scribus, but it is only one of many Open Source programs and
> suites I use.  And since they are all free for the download I have no
> problems using multiple programs and scripts, including the ones that
> are command line based like the ones above. Why limit your tool kit?

Maybe the smartest way to answer here is building an interface from 
within Scribus to the tools you need (i. e. ghostscript). You wouldn't 
have to invent the wheel, but a "wrapper"-like mechanism could consider 
details like those I was asked for: What about the pictures? What about 
the fonts?

And with some logical combination of "most wanted features", the 
contents not fitting into the process of shrinking could be made 
fitting, maybe just by putting them into more shrinkable copies to avoid 
touching the original data. There would be enough helpers (i. e. 
commandline programs) to do even that job.

You would, however, need to do that from within Scribus to have access 
to the original document. Or is it possible to detach a ready-made pdf 
and downsize the pictures contained?

Regards

Rolf



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