PDF parsing error at print office

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Drakefin

Greetings lovely scribus community,

I am an amateur at graphics design and started my involutary career with the task of making a wedding magazine for a friend of mine. After weeks of sweat and tears I finally got a 24 page magazine, made in scribus with the settings the print office suggested (ICC profile, margins, cutting, CMYK).

I made the whole magazine on my ubuntu system and scribus 1.4.x (stable branch) and exported the PDF in PDF 1.3 as requested by the office, resulting in a pdf with 250MB size.
They replied to me that the pdf is corrupted, giving them parsing errors due to not correctly embedded pictures. To verify that I installed the trial version of Adobe Illustrator, and got indeed a warning when opening my PDF file - but the PDF opened nevertheless.

After some research I found out that scribus in version 1.4.x does not include the whole pictures, just the paths to it. So I installed the dev version 1.5.x which should embed the pictures correctly. I did so and got a 1.5 GB big PDF file with the same export settings as in scribus version 1.4.x - so I thought its correct this time, but after opening the 1.5 GB PDF in Adobe Illustrator again I got the same warning as before.

So my question is: How can I verify if my PDF is correct this time, or if its just a random warning that can be ignored. Is there a way for me to check if the images are embedded correctly and with good quality in my PDF? How comes the images are not embedded correctly after all - even with version 1.4.x - since scribus is supposed to make print ready PDFs. I can't really relate to the complaints of the printing office, but I also don't know which software they are using.

Can You help me please? Thanks alot :)

a.l.e

scribus in any version will embed your picture in the pdf.

there is no other way of doing it.

i wonder if you have somehow disabled the embedding of the pictures.
no idea if and how one could do that.
and if it would be possible, i wouldn't expect any traces of the images in the pdf.

if you can share the pdf and eventually the .sla collected for output, we can have a look at it...

ciao
a.l.e

utnik

hi drakefin
Quote from: a.l.e on August 17, 2017, 01:47:19 PMi wonder if you have somehow disabled the embedding of the pictures.
no idea if and how one could do that.

afaik there's no official way to export to .pdf without images.
...but you could remove the images (or the .sla file) before the export and ignore the warning about missing images. (but i hope, this is not what happend with your file...)

utnik

GarryP

Welcome to the forum Drakefin.

This isn't my area at all so I can't really give any useful comments or advice but I vaguely remember that, a while ago, on a few occasions, someone said their print shop was refusing to use PDFs created by Scribus because their printer/software didn't like anything that wasn't created using "official" software (e.g. Adobe, even though they no longer own the format).

From my hazy memory I seem to remember that the software checked the "PDF Producer" information and simply threw out anything that it didn't have in it's list of official creators. Something to do with Adobe strong-arming the hardware suppliers or some such. I could easily be wrong about that though.

A quick search of the forum brought this up http://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,1880.0.html but I don't think it's entirely relevant. Maybe another forum member can remember/find the posts I'm thinking of.

If you could try and ask the print shop for the exact errors/warnings that are being seen, and exactly what software/hardware they're using - without sounding like you're saying it could be their fault - then someone might be able to give more specific help.

Drakefin

#4
Wow Thank You alot for your replies!! You are really helping me out.

I can give You the WeTransfer Link the print office got from me, but it contains alot of pictures and cheesy fairy tale stuff - so brace yourself ;) :

https://we.tl/M7mlom2RBz

Will be available till August 22nd. That is the first 'bad' version they had problems with, with only 243 MB in size. And ye @GarryP, I somehow had the same assumption first, since all I heard about scribus was positive stuff. But let's see what you experts say about the PDF.

Thanks a ton again :]

jghali

>> To verify that I installed the trial version of Adobe Illustrator, and got indeed a warning when opening my PDF file - but the PDF opened nevertheless.

I sincerely hope your print shop does not use Adobe Illustrator to open PDFs... because the only PDFs Illustrator opens reliably are the PDFs written by Illustrator itself with a "preserve editability" option checked. Illustrator preserve editability by writing Illustrator specific information in the PDFs. When reopening the PDFs, Illustrator read the Illustrator specific information and... ignore the PDF part.  When the Illustrator specific part is missing, Illustrator try do to its best, but regularly fail. Adobe Illustrator is neither a generic PDF editor nor a PDF viewer.

I downloaded your PDF, opened it in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat and scrolled through all pages: no error or warning message. I also tested the PDF using Acrobat Acrobat PDF syntax check: no error or warning either.

Drakefin

Quote from: jghali on August 17, 2017, 08:22:45 PM
>> To verify that I installed the trial version of Adobe Illustrator, and got indeed a warning when opening my PDF file - but the PDF opened nevertheless.

I sincerely hope your print shop does not use Adobe Illustrator to open PDFs... because the only PDFs Illustrator opens reliably are the PDFs written by Illustrator itself with a "preserve editability" option checked. Illustrator preserve editability by writing Illustrator specific information in the PDFs. When reopening the PDFs, Illustrator read the Illustrator specific information and... ignore the PDF part.  When the Illustrator specific part is missing, Illustrator try do to its best, but regularly fail. Adobe Illustrator is neither a generic PDF editor nor a PDF viewer.

I downloaded your PDF, opened it in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat and scrolled through all pages: no error or warning message. I also tested the PDF using Acrobat Acrobat PDF syntax check: no error or warning either.

Thank You Jghali for checking it - Yeah I guess I will upload the 1.5 GB PDF with consolidated layers and see what they are saying. I really have no clue what else I could improve about the PDFs.

mnawij

Hi, welcome to Scribus.  I agree with GarryP, I would need to know which application the printer used to get the error.  Was it a desktop app or the RIP software.  The fact that they are asking for pdf v1.3 is kind of suspect to me. The minimum I recommend at my print shop is v1.4 and my RIP software will not even accept a 1.3 pdf...  I also opened the pdf file with no errors in Adobe Acrobat Professional, though I have not got a chance to run it through my RIP.

Regards,

mnawij

Drakefin

Ok I got an answer from the print office - they are accepting my PDF now ....

The only differences are the following:
- using scribus version 1.5.x and having 1.5 GB File instead of 243 MB
- deleting all transparency (which seems obvious with them using PDF 1.3 instead of more elaborated ones)

So yeah, they basically gave me the wrong information about image embedding, I think the only issue was with transparency.

Thank You alot for all your time and advice :] I really appreciated it

Regards
Drakefin

GarryP

You're welcome Drakefin. Glad you've found a fix.

One last(?) thing: The whole problem might have just been the transparencies. Have you tried removing the transparencies with 1.4.6 and seeing if the print shop is okay with that output? It might mean you not having to use 1.5.x at all and could keep your PDF size down.

I don't know why 1.5.x is making the PDF so big as opposed to 1.4.6. As utnik said earlier, the images are always embedded in the PDF - it's a self-contained document format. A bit more experimentation - with the continued support of your print shop - may yield better results.