[scribus] Scribus feature request--produce compressed PDF output

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/03/2015 03:10 PM, Murray Strome wrote:
> I am teaching Scribus to several people, most of whom use Microsoft Windows. In my own experience over the years, I have found that the PDF files created by Scribus are very large. I normally do my own work in LINUX, and have found a workflow to create compressed PDF files which works fine for me, but would not be suitable for most of the students in my class, as none of them use LINUX nor are they at all familiar with working with Scripts.  The ideal solution would be to have an option within Scribus when creating a PDF file to produce either full or compressed version. An acceptable alternative would be to have a separate GUI based program to run the script in Windows as well as Mac and LINUX. The Script I use to do the job is a slightly modified version of  the Perl script, compress_newsletter.pl, the original for which can be found here:http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Web_optimised_PDF(I don't think the original works any more).I have attached the script I use as a text file call
ed compress_newsletter.pl.txt -- remove the ".txt" and make it executable to run. I was not permitted to attach it with the .pl extension.My normal work-flow is to run the script:compress-newsletter.pl {original file name}.pdf
> the result is {original file name}.new.pdf
> The script cleans up a lot of the temporary files it creates, but does leave a file {original file name}.meta, which really should be deleted within the script (I delete it manually).
> Normally, I then do:rm {original file name}.pdfmv {original file name}.new.pdf {original file name}.pdf
> It would be nice if the script were modified so thata) the meta file is removed automaticallyb) an option would be to replace the original file.  I would suggest that running it without any option would leave both files, but doing:
> 
> compress-newsletter.pl -r {original file name}.pdf
> would result in the original file be replaced.
> ----------
> Now comes the more interesting challenge:
> As I mentioned earlier, virtually all of the people attending my Scribus training are using Windows and have relatively limited computer skills.  It would be great to have a GUI to run this script in Windows to accomplish this task, or better yet, to have the functionality built into Scribus
> Anyone interested in the challenge of creating something like this (it would be even nicer if it would run in LINUX and OS-X)?

Here is something worth looking at:

http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Image_DPI_and_Scaling,_and_Resultant_File_Sizes

What it shows are some methods to reduce PDF size simply by various
settings for images. In many cases, I think users will load a huge image
file into Scribus, and because they make its dimensions small in
Scribus, they think the data has shrunk. It hasn't.

I think much of the bulk in PDFs can be traced to images. Pure text PDFs
from Scribus are not that big.

Greg