PDF Exporting from Scribus

Screen Display and On-line PDF Forms

Choose these settings when downloading speed or small size is important.

Recommended Settings and Hints:

• Down-sample all images to 72-96DPI.
• Reduce the number of font faces to the minimum needed.
• Choose the lowest quality setting for compression which has acceptable on-screen viewing results.
• You can often substitute Arial for Helvetica, as later viewers will often have this as an included font.
• Avoid importing EPS or PDFs into your document - instead convert them to a low resolution PNG with GSview, then place in your Scribus document. Why? They will render faster on your screen and often make for a smaller file size.
• Avoid using the Nimbus fonts, if they are not at least sub-set. Acrobat Reader on other platforms does a poor job of substitution using its included fonts. One other issue which can trip you up is Helvetica is often aliased to Nimbus Sans L on many distributions.
• Unless transparency in artwork is needed, select PDF 1.3 output for the greatest compatibility with other users.
• Where possible replace bitmap images with vector artwork. Vector artwork is far more compact in terms of size in PDF.

When addressing PDF optimization for web sites there are two issues:

Global size of the file. Which can partly be reduced by carefully choosing fonts and not using too many font faces. You can if space is really an issue not embedding fonts and using only the 'base 14" fonts which all PDF readers should have. Those fonts include bold and italic variants of Courier, Helvetica or ArialMT, and Times.

The second is the perceived download times when the PDF is visible in the viewer. Ghostscript has a command line utility, pdfopt, which can 'linearize' a PDF and allow a PDF reader to display the first page of the PDF, then subsequent pages to load in the background. This is very useful for longer documents. Note this tool does not shrink the PDF, but actually may increase the size as it undoes the non-linear way objects are stored in PDF. The use.html in the Ghostscript documentation for details. Note also that the apache web server needs to be set up with a feature which is call 'byte-serving'.