I have always noticed that the pdf generation on Scribus seemed to be on the large side, but I have always just thought I could grin and bear it, most of my projects are for print, and I just upload them to my server when they are too big to be e-mailed.
However, I am at the point where I can't bear it, and moreover, I am sure there must be something that can be done (i.e. something that I am doing wrong). I now have two upcoming contracts for EPKs (electronic press kits) and there is no way I can tell my clients that they have to upload it to a server because it is too big for e-mail. After all, the whole point is that you can send it by e-mail!
To give an example, yesterday I printed a letter sized brochure, recto verso, colour. There was a full size image on the front and another on the back, some text as well and a logo. The images were at 219 and 250 dpi, the logo also quite low res, I think 200 dpi. These two pages in pdf came out at a whopping 37.5 MB.
Where have I gone wrong? I didn't check the "limit images to 300dpi" box because they were already less than that. I did outline the fonts out of laziness, I admit, but when I went back and embedded them, it ended up at 38MB. I have set "compress text and vector graphics" to Method:Automatic and Quality:Maximum. Honestly, considering that my images were lower resolution than I would have liked, I am not eager to lower the quality.
I am sorry if this topic has been covered, I did browse around looking for a thread, but most of them seemed to focus on re-sizing your image to the appropriate size before importing it, and I feel that I have done that.