Making PDFs smaller?

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inkuser

From the document I'm working with, I made a PDF that looked fine, and was appx 5MB.

Subsequent PDFs from the same document, with all of the same text and images, now weigh in at 15MB.

Maybe I checked or didn't check something..can anyone suggest what to do to produce smaller PDFs?

Thank you!

a.l.e

are you using new / different fonts?

are you including instead of subsetting otf fonts?

which version of scribus?

did you change anything between the two exports?

inkuser

Quote from: a.l.e on October 14, 2019, 06:55:22 PM
are you using new / different fonts?

are you including instead of subsetting otf fonts?

which version of scribus?

did you change anything between the two exports?

I'm using the same fonts.

I can't see the answer to "including instead of subsetting OTF fonts" I did choose embed fonts.

Scribus 1.4.8

If I changed anything, it'd be slight position changes, but the same images, same numnber of images.

a.l.e

if in the version you were subsetting and in the second included the otf font, this would probably explain the increase in the size of the pdf file.

but since you're using 1.4.8, you probably cannot include otf fonts at all.

anyway, the pdf is composed by the glyphs placed on the page, copies of the images and the font files.

the sum of those elements makes the pdf size.

if you did not add text, did not change anything in the fonts used (even for things you have deleted afterwards), nor touched at the images (and at the way they are included in the pdf), you might to create a new file that is similar to what you have (but only contain things you can share), make copies each time you save it and create the pdf and if you can reproduce again the issue, you can then share the files so that we can look at them!

scribus is known for creating rather big pdfs, but i've never heard of anyone who experienced a file growth that had no reason...

inkuser

I get what you're saying and I will note it. For now, I used Acrobat Pro to produce a smaller PDF..got it down to 2.5MB

I tend to go with defaults unless I'm sure of what I'm changing, so I am 99% sure I didn't tinker with any settings

a.l.e

inkuser,

as i asked to you in the previous post, if you did not change anything, can you please try to reproduce and keep all the intermediate files?

if what you write is correct (you did not change anything and the size of the pdf exploded), then there is probably a way to avoid it, once we have all the files.

and, of course, you can reduce the size by using ghostscript or adobe pro... but that's a different topic.

inkuser

If I understand you correctly, I did it several times yesterday: PDFd the same document with all of the same graphic and text elements.

The resulting PDF was consistently appx 15mb; Acrobat pro knocked it down to 2.7mb

a.l.e

so i have to suppose that you never had a 5 Mb Pdf created from the same .sla document.

acrobad and ghostscript can simplify (the glyphs placement of) Pdfs generated by scribus and shrink the file size.
that's a well known and documented optimization.