I am a new user of Scribus, and I believe it is a great tool.
I am using Scribus 1.4.5. Since January I am publishing a simple monthly magazine in a community and distribute it as pdf by means of an email group.
In the beginning after a few tests, I built my first document with various fonts, colors and master pages I will be using : cover page, left page and right page. Than I created the first magazine. For each new magazine I get the file copy of the previous one, and by deleting and adding new articles, pictures etc I am building the new one.
I have observed a growing trend in the size of the .sla and .pdf files. But I suspect that the increase in .sla file size is much more important.
Following are the .sla and .pdf file sizes of the past 4 magazines and the new magazine for May.
issue scribus pdf pages
#1 3.03 MB 2.23 MB 12
#2 2.25 MB 2.52 MB 20
#3 11.31 MB 5.04 MB 29
#4 22.42 MB 6.87 MB 32
#5 127.98 MB 15.44 MB 28
As you can see there is some trend towards bigger .sla files. I suspect Scribus keeps rubbish data from the previous .sla file and so may be that data is accumulated in the file. By rubbish I mean that I delete a box but it is not really deleted. it stays inside the file.
Between issue 2 -> 3 : I added 9 pages and may be a bit more pictures (on the average), but the .sla file doubled and so did the .pdf. So I cannot say much about it. I also didn't suspected anything at that time.
Between issue 3 -> 4: I added just 3 pages more but the .sla file doubled again. The .pdf just got greater by 1/5 th of the previous one so isn't this really weird ?
Now I am preparing the 5 th issue. My number of pages actually went down by 4 this month, but the .sla file is 6 times bigger (!) and the .pdf file 2.5 times bigger (!).
I decided to copy the .sla #5 and remove all those pages but leave those whom I require in each each issue and use this .sla file as a template to start each month's magazine from scratch from this .sla. I deleted all pages and went down to 6 pages: just the cover page (1), two inner pages (2,3), two empty pages (4, 5), and the closing page (6). I also created the .pdf file.
This is what I got !!!
issue scribus pdf pages
#5 127.98 MB 15.44 MB 28
templ. 54.61 MB 0.99 MB 6
The first issue with 12 pages was at least three times bigger than this. The pdf may be considered as OK but the .sla is really weird.
I decided to do another test because I might be doing something wrong with the pictures and there were quite a lot of pictures in issue 5. What I am actually doing is this: I use a free picture editing software named "Photofiltre". I copy paste or open the picture in this application and then I resize it to my needs most of the time I am not saving the picture to disk but I am just copy-pasting it from this software into scribus' picture boxes. I suspected that, may be what I copy even after the resize of the picture might not be that of the actual file to be saved. So may be I have to save the pictures first on disk and than get them by means of the "get"option into the picture boxes in scribus. I did this. I usually resize my fotos to fit in an 800x800 pixel box, but this time I was quite conservative and resized them to fit in a 600x600 box. I saved them to disk and used the "get" option to load them into the picture boxes. This is the result:
issue scribus pdf pages
#5 127.98 MB 15.44 MB 28
new 82.17 MB 9,25 MB 28
The sizes of my pictures on disk are much less than 150 KB and many even less than 100 KB. SO may be the difference of 40 MB decrease was due to such a problem.
But both files are still too big.
I compressed the pdf by means of
https://online2pdf.com/ web page. and the resulting pdf file got down to 4.18 MB which is satisfactory. But for me the .sla file size is much more important because this show that there is some problem is scribus.
I'd like to know if you have such an experience, I couldn't search all the forums for this, I just found discussions abıut the pdf sizes. Which are not of much relevance to me.
Many thanks in advance,
Vasil