Q and A Document Index Hyphenation - Type Hints

PDF Exporting from Scribus

The decision to concentrate on PDF as an export method, is in this author's opinion an excellent idea. It eliminates many cross platform issues when the objective is to have the document commercially printed or sent to users with other operating systems. It allows 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 5 and Illustrator 10.


Scribus has again extended PDF creation during the 0.9.x development versions in a number of substantial ways. This fifth generation driver has new features and export capabilities including:

PDF Form Generation was been added in 0.7.5. 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://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/archive/archivelist.html#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 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 4.3.

Please note there are some limitations with level 3 postscript output and certain versions of Ghostscript prior to 6.53. Versions after 6.53 should have much better support for alpha transparency. It is the developer's recommendation to have the latest stable version of Ghostscript which is compatible with your system.

Scribus tries to work around this by limiting the usage of level 3 constructs in postscript output. You can optionally create a postscript file directly from the print dialog box and separately convert a postscript file to PDF with Ghostscript's ps2pdf and or other postscript various conversion options. Newer RIP's will have fewer troubles outputting with these newer features enabled. For Ghostscript options, consult the Ghostscript documentation for exact details.



Q and A Document Index Hyphenation - Type Hints