PDF Compatibility

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Timbow

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]

Meho R.

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".

a.l.e

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...

Timbow

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

a.l.e

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

Timbow

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

a.l.e

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)

Timbow


Wena

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

Wena

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.

Timbow

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

a.l.e

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

Wena

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.


Wena

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

Timbow

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