[scribus] To Outline Or Not To Outline?

John Culleton john at wexfordpress.com
Thu Jul 28 18:16:05 UTC 2011


On Thursday, July 28, 2011 08:28:42 am John Culleton 
wrote:
> On Thursday, July 28, 2011 12:55:19 am Mike Sleger 
wrote:
> > I've completed my first Scribus document on OS X and
> 
> went to save it as PDF
> 
> > but none of the fonts will embed.  .  If that's the
> 
> case, then why ever embed
> 
> > fonts?  I'm curious what a professional printing 
service
> 
> (and experienced
> 
> > Scribus users) prefers when it comes to fonts and PDF
> 
> output.  All
> 
> > comments are welcome, and I'll take everything into
> 
> consideration when
> 
> > doing the final export.  Thanks. ___
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> 
> As usual, it all depends. A brief document with outlines
> instead of fonts will be fine. But a book length 
document
> with lots of text, all of it outlined, would be huge. 
The
> detailed description of the letter "o" for example will
> take up more space than the pointer to that letter in a
> font file. If the text is outlined that description will
> be repeated over and over again. So the answer is
> different depending on the amount of text involved.
> 
> I will conduct a brief experiment to indicate the
> magnitude of the difference.

I filled 99 pages with dummy text. Unfortunately the 
conversion to outlines stalled. I restarted Scribus and 
managed convert a few more pages. At this point the size 
of the original pdf with a single font embedded is 
1,786,612 bytes. The PDF of the same sla file with some of 
the text outlined is 1,974,990 bytes. 

The sla file proper is showing more dramatic increases. 
The original sla with a single embedded font is 541,130 
bytes. The sla with some of the text outlined jumps to 
9,037,694 bytes, a 20 fold increase.

As I proceed to outline more of the text the numbers will 
climb higher. This is a tedious process because of 
frequent crashes while outlining the fonts. But already 
you get the idea. Whether the outlining of all of the text 
blows the file up to a point where either the sla or the 
pdf is unmanageable is yet to be determined. 

Bootom line, the outining of all the fonts in a 100 page 
document is a questionable procedure, how questionable is 
yet to be determined. 
-- 
John Culleton


"Create Book Covers with Scribus"
http://booklocker.com/books/4055.html
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