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


Reply via email to