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:
- The ability to create PDF/X-3 compliant PDF's. More info is here: PDF/X-3 Creation with Scribus
Interactive PDF Form Creation - giving users a completely new way to use PDF's
Saves the document as an PDF-File. The current version can save in either PDF version 1.3 (Acrobat 4) or 1.4 (Acrobat 5.x).
Completely embedding fonts. When exporting for print and when the embed fonts option is enabled, Scribus embeds the entire font. It is this authors opinion this is a more reliable choice than sub-setting, if you desire an exact reproduction of your layout including the fonts and text spacing chosen to layout your document. This option eliminates one troublesome issue with other publishing platforms - font substitution when outputting postscript for PDF.
Presentation Effects - This will allow you to layout a series of pages which can be both printed and presented using Adobe Acrobat Reader or Similar in full screen. These effects include variations on fade, wipes,blinds and others.
Down-sampling of high resolution images within the PDF. EPS images can also be optionally reduced. This allows you to create two or three versions of the same document; one for web download,one for desktop printing and one for commercial reproduction.
Annotations - Annotations are non-printing notes which are displayed as an icon which open a mouse in Acrobat Reader or similar. This allow you for example to include definitions for a technical term in a PDF file.
Thumbnails - the PDF exporter can created thumbnails of your pages which can be displayed within Acrobat Reader or similar.
Bookmarks - Allows you to create a simplified version of an index, which can allow a user to go directly to a section of a PDF file in the viewer
Because of the way fonts and images are embedded, the PDF driver solves some of the limitations of ps2pdf in Ghostscript (600 dpi max, troublesome font embedding, ease of use)
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:
Select then right clicking on a Text Frame
Convert the it to a PDF-Annotation by choosing "Is PDF-Annotation"
Then, right click the Text Frame again and then choose "Annotation Properties" from the context menu.
From here there is a number of choices to create interactive form within a PDF including:
Buttons, Javascript capable buttons, Formulas, Rollovers, Text Fields, Number Fields, Tool Tips etc. Here: Here: http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?WebPageID=338 is a great link for developing server side interactive forms with a Unix toolkit.
**Your best results will be with the newest version of Acrobat Reader 5.0.6 for Linux. The program author and I have discovered Linux version is missing some functionality with the javascript capabilities of Version 4.05 and 5.0.6 on Linux. Some of these bugs are not present in Acrobat Reader 5.0.5 on the Mac or Windows 98SE / Windows 2000. Within the/scribus/samples/folder is scribusformsdoc.pdf, which is the introduction of the new features by an interactive PDF. Also included are some some sample Scribus documents which also demonstrate the new PDF features. Opening the survey.pdf file will demo some of the presentation effects. To view the introductory PDF, open Acrobat Reader, then navigate to:
../scribus/samples/scribusformsdoc.pdfHere 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:
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.
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.)
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.
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.
![]()
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.