Scribus display of imported pdfs

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CGood

OK, here's a loaded topic. Loaded since it has to do with two programs, Scribus and Inkscape, and the waters are totally muddied by my near complete ignorance.

I'm trying to become competent with Scribus and Inkscape. Yesterday I created a piece of mildly stretched and distorted text in Inkscape, in a way that seems natural to the vector nature of Inkscape, and then used my Inkscape product in Scribus. Let me call what I made in Inkscape "word art" for lack of a better term. I saved the word art as a pdf and placed it in a Scribus document. Sizing and placing the word art was easy, and all seemed to be fine.

I thought I was home free. I added some ordinary text using Scribus and overall the product looked good.  Except that when I zoomed in to see the smooth super quality vector art from Inkscape, all the edges were nasty and jagged as if I had hacked something up in a raster program.

I tried a zillion (almost) different file formats, settings... to try to get rid of the jagged edges and nothing helped. I spent most of an evening fooling around trying to outwit the quality loss. Then, because I have found in the past that the Scribus display can be misleading, I did a pdf output of the whole document from scribus, and the pdf from Scribus was fine, at least when viewed in an image viewer. The vector quality was there - smooth vector edges with no stairsteps etc. But view it in Scribus and the word art looks messy.

I'm left wondering again what is going on. Am I misunderstanding something basic? Did I do something wrong?

Some basics: Linux Mint 17.2, Scribus 1.5.1, Inkscape 0.91

Moderators - If this belongs in a different board - my apologies - please feel free to move it.

CGood

I'll add that it appears that using a svg from Inkscape seems not to be supported to populate a Scribus image frame. I don't understand that, since a svg looks like it should be a vector image that would I hope work well with Scribus. I think I'm missing understanding a bunch of basics.

utnik

hi cgood

you shouldn't place vector graphics in image frames.
try 'file' → 'import' → 'get vector file' instead.

utnik

CGood

You are a genius! Works like a charm! Thank you.

Nermander

The explanation here is that when you place a PDF into an image frame Scribus will rasterize it (using ghostscript) for the preview.

During export to PDF there is a checkbox whether to export the embedded PDF as a raster image or a vector image (I think the latter feature is still stated to be experimental, mostly due to that it does not correctly handle color management).


By importing the SVG as a vector object it becomes native Scribus vectors and remain vectors during export to PDF.

CGood

Thank you once again!!! That makes it make sense.