Warning: Scribus has many issues in Print PDF Formats

[HiddenPlane]

On 6/13 I released digital versions of my books. I spent all my publisher time since then trying to get the print formats approved by the printer who only accepts PDF/X-1 or PDF/X-3. Scribus failed to generate either format correctly. This was narrowed down to two main issues:

• CID Font Types were not embedded properly.
• Transparency in images was not processed properly below PDF/X-4.

Both of these problems were eliminated by purchasing Affinity Publisher, opening the Scribus-created PDF/X-4, and exporting it to PDF/X-3. It handled the fonts correctly. It handled transparency in images without any distortion, lines, or white space. I liked Scribus. I invested over a year in it, but at the end of the day, I had to pay for Affinity anyway, so it was a waste. I should have bought Affinity upfront and skipped a month of nonstop troubleshooting that ultimately turned out to be Scribus product issues.

Please be aware if you're considering using Scribus for print with a PoD printer and planning an advanced, professional layout, you could run into dead end issues generating PDFs for the printer.

[toyotadesigner]

I am printing large format images on LF printer, books, magazines, brochures, etc. for a decade now with Scribus, and never had a problem.

Scribus generates the cleanest PDF code, offering different standards and adhering to the standards like no other software does.

Though I've purchased Affinity Publisher 3 years ago, I've never used it for real world print jobs, because it is too buggy.

Long story short: I assume you don't know anything about pre-press, and even worse, you don't know how to use Scribus.

[HiddenPlane]

My experience trying to get PDF/X-1 or PDF/X-3 formats accepted by a printer who only accepts those formats found that Scribus could not generate suitable formats of either due to the above two issues.

If you have experience with those formats around CID font embedding or handling image transparency, would you share it instead of attacking my experience level? As it stands now, DriveThruRPG is deleting all references and support articles for Scribus due to how frequently they run into print PDF generation problems.

[toyotadesigner]

That is the problem of the printer. Some of them use a software that requires the word »Adobe« in the PDF header.

If DriveThruRPG is deleting all references to Scribus, you should contact DriveThru. I have had long discussions with some print companies about this topic. When we added the missing keyword in the PDF header, the problems were gone, but I never again used their service, because this proved that they are Adobe Software oriented.

[HiddenPlane]

Thank you. That was interesting.

[utnik]

My experience trying to get PDF/X-1 or PDF/X-3 formats accepted by a printer who only accepts those formats found that Scribus could not generate suitable formats of either due to the above two issues.

well, if you really need 1.3 based .pdf files (x-1 or x-3) and use transparencies, you need to export in i more recent format and convert to the 1.3 based .pdf later (flattening the transparencies) with another software. the free 'ghostscript' could do this...

utnik

[KeithS]

Due either of the two of you have any comment on the question that that I posted just the other day about the lose of the color background when I use Adobe Reader to display the Scibus printer output.  This is not a good explanation of my problem (please read my complete post titled "No color in PDF" and comment if you can help.

KeithS

[AdmFubar]

Are you using a pantone color in your document?

[OSDP]

1. CID Font Types were not embedded properly.
2. Transparency in images was not processed properly below PDF/X-4.

There is a possible alternative solution to these two problems.

Once the .pdf is finalized, simply export all pages to .jpg or .tiff
Then, to recompose the .pdf from the chosen image format. The final document will certainly be much heavier!
But the "problems of transparencies and fonts" jump, because everything is transformed/flattened into a single image.
This requires additional exports and paginations, but it is radical.