Comment from a Scribus developer
Comment on ScribusAndreas Vox
Comment from a Scribus developer
Posted:14 Oct 2008 (19:47 UTC)Uh, in our experience the pdf generation in Scribus is very reliable. Of course, if you use the wrong settings, you can get reliably bad results.
Some hints on how Scribus handles PDF generation:
First issue is the type of images.
a) JPG should do fine, but if you limit the DPI in the output, Scribus will re-rasterize it.
b) Avoid placing PDF images into Scribus documents. Traditionally Scribus uses ghostscript to rasterize the PDF and embeds a bitmap. That will increase the size and reduce the quality.
c) Other bitmap formats should do fine.
Second issue are the settings for DPI limit and compression. Images should be re-rasterized at most once. If it needs to be re-rasterized by the RIP, it should have 150%-300% of the target DPI. Yes, that increases the file size, but re-rasterizing will produce poor results if source DPI and target DPI are similar but not identical.
For compression, use default or lossless.
Third issue is color management. If you use colormanagement with the right ICC profiles, Scribus will produce good results. If you don't use colormanagement, you'll get the usual color shifts. Especially CMYK data will look very different on screen and on paper. Note that you have to choose the target "Web/Screen" if you want to produce a PDF in the RGB color space — target "Printer" will always procude CMYK colors.
We are very interested to learn of specific issues with Scribus-generated PDFs. The only causes for the case you describe — large PDFs with poor image quality — I can imagine is embedded PDF images or if you request to limit the DPI of JPG images.
Scribus users can always ask for help & advice on our friendly mailing list or our IRC channel on freenode.net .
Cheers
/Andreas
Some hints on how Scribus handles PDF generation:
First issue is the type of images.
a) JPG should do fine, but if you limit the DPI in the output, Scribus will re-rasterize it.
b) Avoid placing PDF images into Scribus documents. Traditionally Scribus uses ghostscript to rasterize the PDF and embeds a bitmap. That will increase the size and reduce the quality.
c) Other bitmap formats should do fine.
Second issue are the settings for DPI limit and compression. Images should be re-rasterized at most once. If it needs to be re-rasterized by the RIP, it should have 150%-300% of the target DPI. Yes, that increases the file size, but re-rasterizing will produce poor results if source DPI and target DPI are similar but not identical.
For compression, use default or lossless.
Third issue is color management. If you use colormanagement with the right ICC profiles, Scribus will produce good results. If you don't use colormanagement, you'll get the usual color shifts. Especially CMYK data will look very different on screen and on paper. Note that you have to choose the target "Web/Screen" if you want to produce a PDF in the RGB color space — target "Printer" will always procude CMYK colors.
We are very interested to learn of specific issues with Scribus-generated PDFs. The only causes for the case you describe — large PDFs with poor image quality — I can imagine is embedded PDF images or if you request to limit the DPI of JPG images.
Scribus users can always ask for help & advice on our friendly mailing list or our IRC channel on freenode.net .
Cheers
/Andreas
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