Scribus SVG Q and A § Document Index § Hyphenation - Type Hints

PDF Exporting from Scribus

Overview Scribus PDF Export Features

The power and versaility with the PDF Export featues in Scribus is in my opinion one of its best features. The platform neutral nature of PDF enables Scribus users to overcome a number of potential barriers to Linux and DTP. Scribus can reliably export high quailty, "press-ready" PDF including advanced PDF 1.4 features, ISO compliant PDF/X-3 and now with color managed PDF, thanks to littlecms. If that is all Scribus could do, that alone would make Scribus a great application. The bonus is all the easy to use versatilty like creating presentations á la Powerpoint or creating web-enabled PDF interactive forms which can be used with electronic document exchange, the ability to use javascript to control elements within the PDF and other user friendly touches like annotations, bookmarks and optionally document security if needed. While PDF in one sense is a proprietary standard, it is also widely available on most every computing platform. It is also extemely well documented. The upcoming 1.5 draft reference manual is mere 1100 pages. The PDF abilities in Scribus enables for re-purposing a document. One document can be produced for printing, web download or for presentation like Star Office Impress or MS Power point. That this is a future trend in publishing is indicated by the same strategy in Adobe's InDesign 2.0 and the new PDF capabilities in Quark Xpress 6 and Illustrator 10. In electronic publishing and pre-press production, both have seen many enhancements to PDF, which often overcome the limitations of HTML and tradtional postscript, respectively.


Scribus 1.0 has extended PDF creation features. This sixth generation driver has new features and export capabilities including:

PDF Form Generation This allows the creation of interactive forms with formulas and list lookups among others. There is also a javascript editor from which you can import javascripts into your document. To add this capability:

Here are three links to the reference documentation for javascript and interactive form creation with PDF:

http://devedge.netscape.com/central/javascript/

http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5186AcroJS.pdf

http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/technotes/acrobatpdf.html

Aside from interactive PDF creation, for a given document, there are basically 4 paths to follow in creating your PDF:

  1. Web down load - Screen Reading -Interactive Forms - the recommended settings are down-sample all images to 72dpi, do not embed fonts. To ensure a reasonably close layout, choose "Base 14 fonts" fonts which are typically included with all versions of Acrobat Reader and have similar substitutions with Ghostscript: This would include your basic variations of Courier, Helvetica, Times (Nimbus), Symbol and Zapf Dingbat, which are all similar on most PC platforms.

  2. Print Optimized - This would mean targeting the PDF for printing on an office laser jet or ink jet. Recommended settings: down-sample all images to 300 dpi, embed fonts and keep your page margins with enough tolerance for margin limits on desktop and common office laser printers (approx. 6/10 the of and inch or 15 cm.)

  3. Press Optimized - Clear all down sampling or compression of images where image quality is of utmost importance. All images brought into to Scribus as placed images should be a minimum or 200 dpi and preferably 300 dpi or more for photos or TIFFS. Line art or vector graphics converted to an EPS in a program like Illustrator should have a minimum of 800 dpi for best results. This is the recommended method if you are creating PDF/X-3 compliant PDF's.

  4. Presentation effects - the recommended settings are down-sample all images to 72, 96 or 120 dpi, depending on the resolution of the display screen. Embed all fonts and landscape page layouts will give you maximum image area on the screen if you plan on using a display projector.


PDF export options

What are the results? The author has created training manuals for client with colors and fonts embedded which display and print perfectly on Windows PC's, Mac and Linux using versions 4 and 5 of Adobe Acrobat Reader and GSView 4.4. All future documentation for Scribus will be in PDF form, created solely by Scribus.


Scribus SVG Q and A § Document Index § Hyphenation - Type Hints