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Scribus => PDF Generation => Topic started by: The Bookish Mama on October 31, 2011, 02:43:47 PM

Title: Completely blank pdf document (though still about 5MB in size!)
Post by: The Bookish Mama on October 31, 2011, 02:43:47 PM
Hi all,

I'm completely new to Scribus and would appreciate any help I can get.

I've produced a couple of pages of a magazine which look okay in Scribus 1.4 (on a pc) and then clicked on 'save as pdf'. I told it to 'ignore all errors' - to do with image resolution - and then it saved okay. When I moved the 5 MB pdf file onto my Mac (yes, it's all a bit complex, but I'm only online on my mac and want to email it to someone) then it showed me the pdf (in preview) as completely blank pages!

I can go back to the sla document, try to remedy the image resolution and save as pdf again, but I'm confused as to why the pdf is such a large file and BLANK?!

Any help gratefully received!

Thanks a lot.
Title: Re: Completely blank pdf document (though still about 5MB in size!)
Post by: Christen_Anderson on October 31, 2011, 04:03:57 PM
First of all, check the layers palette to make sure that printing is enabled for all of the layers. If printing is disabled, that layer will not appear in your pdf.

Also, Scribus is known for outputting very large pdfs. A couple things you can do to reduce your pdf size are: 1) if your document is intended for web viewing and not for printing, reduce the size of all your images to 72 dpi. 2) crop all your images so they fit perfectly in the frame - i.e. don't let any part of the picture invisibly "hang out" over the edge of the frame. 3) check out this wiki page, "Reduce the Size of Scribus-Generated pdfs": http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Reduce_the_size_of_Scribus_generated_PDFs (http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Reduce_the_size_of_Scribus_generated_PDFs)

If you still experience problems, check back here  ;)
Title: Re: Completely blank pdf document (though still about 5MB in size!)
Post by: The Bookish Mama on October 31, 2011, 10:01:28 PM
Thank you very much for your reply.

I checked the layers palette as you suggested, but all seemed to be okay there. Then I noticed that one of the text frames had more text in it than could actually be seen, so when I sorted that, all seemed to be okay. Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I never would have guessed that these small things would put the pdf generation 'off kilter' as it were.

Thanks again! Now I'm off to figure out how to produce the rest of the A5 magazine...