Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Sunday, September 27, 2015 at 13:39

There are some important options when exporting PDF in Scribus. There are also many professional options I don't know (e.g. I don't have any professional printing purpose). But for my design hobby, I get a good quality PDF when using these. I apply these for my digital magazine. I hope these will useful for you too.

 

1. Compress File Size


A digital magazine file with only 4 pages costs 20 MB. That is too big. We can compress the size into almost a quarter (~5 MB) by enabling options:
  • Compress Text and Vector Graphics
  • Compression Method: Lossy - JPEG
  • Compression Quality: Maximum
See the size differences here (4 MB vs 51 MB):


2. Font Embedding


Font embedding is important when you want your publication displays as same way as you design it in every reader. For example, while you use Bleeding Cowboy font but your readers don't have it installed on their computers, PDF reader will replace that font with existing font on their computers. Your design won't display as you want. So, you need to include the font into your PDF. How to do that?
  1. Save as PDF.
  2. Open tab Fonts.
  3. Click Embed All.
  4. If point 3 fails, click Outline All.


Now try to open your PDF in another computer. Your fonts within PDF must be same as you design it at your computer.