Scribus Forums

Scribus => Beginner Talk => Topic started by: Timbow on September 27, 2011, 06:45:35 PM

Title: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Timbow on September 27, 2011, 06:45:35 PM
Tried to do as first little job with Scribus. Basically getting on alright. However I was laying out a business card to upload as a pdf to moo.com for printing. Got the pdf done as I wanted it, text and raster image, nothing fancy and when it was uploaded the online preview was all wrong text wise. Instead of name and number it seemed to be giving layout data or something totally other.

Is there a known issue with pdf export? Something I should know about like pdf versions or to always convert to curves?

Sorry not to be clearer about the problem, I didn't get a screenshot of the preview, just went "ugh, hell" and used the online text editor because the jpeg was fine.

Thanks,

[edit] Here is what I got. the image is fine, the text is gone mad



[attachment deleted by admin]
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Meho R. on September 28, 2011, 06:57:45 AM
Check if you've embedded (or outlined) fonts during PDF export procedure ("Fonts" tab). For this purpose, "Outline" might be better choice, since it, unlike embedding, doesn't include whole font, but only those chars used in the document, thus resulting in smaller file size. Note that, though "outline" usually means converting to curves, in Scribus (version 1.4.0 and later) it actually means subsetting, so the text will still be searchable.

Note: if you aren't able to embed a font, make sure "Subset" checkbox for that particular font is unchecked in "File > Preferences > Fonts".
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: a.l.e on September 28, 2011, 09:13:44 AM
personally, i don't think that there is any problem with the pdf you have created with scribus.

can you have a look at it with a pdf reader?

i suppose that there was problem when uploading the pdf and the server didn't expect a pdf or didn't recognize the file you have sent as such.

what you see in the text field is just the source code of a pdf file...
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Timbow on September 28, 2011, 02:06:38 PM
The .pdf opened without any probs in Adobe Reader and in Nitropdf. Curiously if I open it in Scribus the text is all there correctly but the image is missing. Is that normal?

This is all no more than a curiosity now, though. I worked around it and job done.

Tim W
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: a.l.e on September 28, 2011, 11:29:18 PM
scribus can't (yet) reliably read PDFs. it can include them in an image frame, but you can't open a PDF with scribus.

but 1.6 will have a much better PDF reading...

ciao
a.l.e
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Timbow on September 29, 2011, 12:53:05 AM
Quote from: a.l.e on September 28, 2011, 11:29:18 PM
... you can't open a PDF with scribus.

Er.... I started up the program, clicked File then Open, selected *.pdf in the file type list and er, opened the pdf, or so I thought. Are you telling me that was some other action?

Tim w
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: a.l.e on September 29, 2011, 09:14:27 AM
it will open with file > open. you may even get some content that way. but in 1.4 this is *not* supported!

please load the pdf in an image frame as you will be doing for any other images.

but remember: scribus is not a pdf editor nor a pdf viewer. so you will be deceived if this is what you're looking for!

what you can do with pdf is: place adds you got in pdf format. the current feature has been implemented for this reason and you should not use it for other things.
and, even for this goal, it's quite limited (if you want to the pdf being included as vector, you will have make sure that the included pdf's color space matches the final pdf one)
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Timbow on September 29, 2011, 10:44:26 AM
Okay, thanks.

Tim W
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Wena on October 18, 2011, 04:03:21 PM
To get a pdf text into Scribus I first scan it by means of an OCR program, (the one I use is "Read & Write Gold" that can produce an editable  Doc file or "Open Office" one. Some times it can make mistakes. Then it can be imported into Scribus.

I believe that there are several OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs about, and some Open Source ones.

Wena
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Wena on October 18, 2011, 04:11:15 PM
To get a pdf text into Scribus I first scan it by means of an OCR program, (the one I use is "Read & Write Gold" that can produce an editable  Doc file or "Open Office" one. Some times it can make mistakes. Then it can be imported into Scribus.
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Timbow on October 18, 2011, 09:28:44 PM
You ought to be able to extract the text from a pdf without using ocr, if indeed it is text and not an image of a page of text.

There are people round here who have forgotten more about pdfs than I will ever learn so I ought to keep quiet but iiuc a pdf is a bit like a metafile in that it can contain text and raster images and vector graphics and html and probably more besides. You can sometimes copy and paste text from a pdf, or nitropdf reader has a command to extract plain text.

T
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: a.l.e on October 18, 2011, 10:43:48 PM
if the pdf is "well behaved", on linux you can use "pdftotext" to get all the text out of the pdf (without formatting)

you can also try through copy paste...

ciao
a.l.e
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Wena on October 26, 2011, 07:13:52 PM
Timbow I will experiment and see how that works, it could be better than using an OCR program.

Or have I miss understand you, dose it convert the PDF into editable text?


Thanks for the hint.

Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Wena on October 26, 2011, 08:55:59 PM
Timbow, I have attempted to import a PDF into sribus v 1.4.5 and it didn't find it. I tried every way I could but it didn't work.

Any suggestions?

Wena
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Timbow on October 26, 2011, 10:22:33 PM
ale said to bring a pdf in as an image in an image frame. Did you try that? I really am not the bloke to be giving scribus advice.

T
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Wena on October 27, 2011, 06:47:02 PM
No I didn't attempt to import as an image, but then that would be no good as the text would not be editable. It seems as if the OCR program is still the only option.

Wena
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Nermander on October 28, 2011, 08:54:39 AM
It is generally very hard to import a PDF as editable text, becuse a PDF is more or less an image.

There are often no "lines" or "paragraphs" in a PDF, there are just a lot of graphical objects (some of them are glyphs from a font, others are lines or other objects).

A PDF is not intended to be edited.
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: a.l.e on October 28, 2011, 11:28:08 AM
wena, you won't be able to edit text from a pdf in scribus 1.4.

it will be possible, under certain circumstances, with 1.6.

it is possible to bring text from a pdf to scribus and you have been told above how to do it.

use copy paste, pdftotext, inkscape, ocr to .odt...

there are lot of ways to do it and each of them probably have some problems since -- as nernamder just wrote to you -- pdf is meant as a final format, not to be further used except for viewing or printing.
(PDFs can indeed be (mis)used for other goals... but that was not the goal when adobe designed it!)

finally, if you have a specific case, please post the file and an exact description of what you want to achieve: with a bit of luck you will get the help you need to achieve your goal!

ciao
a.l.e
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: Nermander on October 28, 2011, 12:06:04 PM
You can put it this way: Think of PDF as a digital paper. You can not (easily) edit something that has already been put on paper. Byt you can include a copy of it, and even crop it.
Title: PDF Garble...
Post by: tobynixon on December 18, 2014, 07:41:47 PM
Hi, I'm a writer. I wrote this book Soldier of Pain. :D It sells extremely poorly on Amazon and I don't have money to market it. I've sold over 300 copies to people who read it cover to cover. Which is pretty good considering I only have word of mouth. I've had offers from Marvel and the Syfy channel to buy the idea outright, but I am much too parental to accept less than $25,000 dollars for my original concept without being part of the creative team working on it and being credited for my original work. These people wouldn't even give me royalties. Anyway, it's a sad story bro.

I want to edit the original copy PDF copy. (That's because I deleted the thumb drive with the original copy on it, OOOPS.) I need to add a new cover and update the story and the book itself a bit. It has horrible formatting.

I tried simply importing the PDF into the Latest Version of Scribus... Which turned it into MUSH. I use several different languages to tell the story with subtitles in English. Those foreign fonts probably is the reason it's just turning into crap.

I don't blame Scribus for this, this was all the fault of this freshman Writer. But I am a good storyteller and my stories are Awesome. Or so the people that read them say. I just want to use Scribus to create a document that looks as good as it reads.

Is there any other way other than simple copy and paste to do that?

Please help.
Title: Re: PDF Compatibility
Post by: AdmFubar on December 19, 2014, 05:18:37 AM
>>>I want to edit the original copy PDF copy. (That's because I deleted the thumb drive with the original copy on it, OOOPS.) I need to add a new cover and update the story and the book itself a bit. It has horrible formatting. <<<

fear not... at least if you really haven't deleted the thumb drive.. I hope you mean you deleted the scribus document on the thumb drive..;)

you just need photorec
see:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

this is utility to recover deleted files. they never really go away on flash media.