[Gllug] Promoting the GLLUG meeting on 12th November

[Tethys]

Henry Gilbert writes:

>PDF are huge for professional quality printing.
>Specially when coming from Scribus.

No, that's a cop out. PDFs are generally very small. Being vector based,
the printing quality is high anyway, without a large filesize. It's usually
due to either:

1.  The use of large numbers of fonts, and the creating application embedding
    those fonts within the document, as opposed to converting the outlines
    to raw vectors instead. There's a tradeoff to be made there, and long
    documents can benefit from embedded fonts, while shorter ones tend to do
    better without.

2.  Embedded raster images. If you have a large, high resolution image, and
    you include it in a small area of the page (the GLLUG logo in the top
    left, for example), then the creating application will often just include
    the full resolution image anyway. PostScript and PDF don't deal with
    raster images very efficiently, so they take up a large amount of space.
    A sane application might have a "reduce raster data to NNN dpi" option
    on PDF export. Few seem to, though.

Tet

PS. As an extreme example of 2, I used to work for News International. One
    day, one of the papers wanted to do a "see, we broke this story first"
    type front page. They included miniature versions of the front page of
    each of 3 or 4 previous days worth of the paper. Only they used the full
    450MB raster for each image, which when reduced to a thumbnail sized
    image resulted in something ridiculous like 30000dpi for the final image.
    Even our highest resolution output devices were nowhere near being able
    to output at that resolution, and hence there was no rational reason for
    those images to be included at that resolution. It played havoc with our
    RIPs, which is how we found out about it...
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