[scribus] Saving as PDF with a smaller file size

Peter Nermander peter at nermander.se
Fri Aug 19 05:29:14 UTC 2011


Most of the tips given will not help much, because the main reason
that Scribus PDF becomes big is NOT bitmap images.

The reason Scribus PDFs become big is that Scribus is very detailed
about the placement of objects, including text.

If you create a PDF from a word processing program it will most likely
print the text line by line (i.e. it will set coordinates and then
print a whole line of text).

As I understand it Scribus places text glyph by glyph. For each
character on a line it will set coordiantes and then print the glyph.
For a text with 80 characters per line this more or less makes the
file 80 times bigger (because instead of just placing each line
Scribus will place 80 characters per line).

The devs may correct me if I'm wrong, maybe this is something that has
improved in later versions?

/Peter



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