Overly Large Pdfs-where am I going wrong?

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a.l.e

as far as i know, there are possible tweaks to the pdf creation that would help decreasing the file size.

some of them are already in use in 1.5.x, others might follow in the future.

but, as you probably guess, the easy ones have already made their into scribus... the ones remaining are the hard ones!

one issue, is that -- most of the time or always -- the glyphs are invidividually placed in the pdf. it would of course be useful to define spread of glyphs that follow a rule and place them in one shot.
but you have to detect the spreads... and be fast at that. and never have a false positive.

images and shapes are also inserted in rather dumb way.
somebody could of course add code to detect repetitions and only insert each image/vector graphic once.
and if the images have been cropped, only the visible part should be inserted in the image.

those are easy tweaks that i can understand well, even if i'm not a specialist in the field.
but getting those transformations right in every case is not a trivial task.
not an impossible one, but it will require time to get it right (most of all because the team will never accept patches that might lead to a bad pdf).

if somebody wants to give it a try, he/she is really welcome to do so!
but you probably understand that the small team of Scribus core programmers currently has other prorities (i mean: the pdf scribus creates are perfect for print... and pdfs for printing are the core business of scribus)

Bemused

Thanks GarryP and  a.l.e for your responses.

Quote from: GarryP on April 19, 2016, 10:57:48 AM
"... it really depends on what you mean by a "draft" PDF. If you ask three people what they would want from a "draft" PDF you'll probably get at least four different answers depending on what situation they're in. ..."

This is very true and a side to this I hadn't really considered. The best solution in the long run is to continue to optimise Scribus and how it handles fonts and images, and I am confident this work will continue. These things take time and effort and I'm grateful for those with the skills and willingness to use them and do the hard work that I can't. Perhaps a "draft" PDF would be useful - but whether it is of enough use to be worth developing - at the expense of developing other aspects of the program more central to its purpose, is very doubtful - to me at least.

Also, as others have suggested, the document size and quality that Scribus produces is largely dependent on the size and quality of the elements I feed into it, and how I use them - and it always will be. It is up to me to choose these carefully to suit my needs.