Corel and littlecms § Document Index § GS View
Using "Hidden" Features with Acrobat Reader and Scribus
Acrobat Reader® is in my experience, one of the essential tools to have when using Scribus. Although mostly a simple viewer, it has some advanced features which no other PDF viewer has in the Linux,*nix world: full support for javascript with a PDF (You did not know a PDF was scriptable? Scribus is unique in the Linux/*nix world for the ability to create scriptable interactive PDF forms.) and detailed info which is embedded in the PDF, but viewable only in Acro Reader. Moreover, while PDF is a published standard, Adobe invented postscript on which PDF is based and has a commericial incentive to promote PDF on all platforms.
Hints for Scribus users:
Note: There is a bug in Acrobat Reader 5.0.7, which will not display form fields properly, unless the user environment is set to lang=en. In addition, it will not even launch under RH 8.0, unless the locale variable is set to lang=en. Otherwise you will get an error message: Warning: charset "UTF-8" not supported, using "ISO8859-1". > Aborted
First, make sure you have the latest version 5.0.7 for Linux. This version is *vastly* better than 4.0.5, even with above mentioned bugs - more stable, faster loading, better printing, and more accurate color. If you are running RedHat 8.0, the easiest way to install Acro Reader is to get the rpms from Gurulabs. The place to get Acrobat Reader, if your distro does not offer an rpm, deb or other package is here: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/alternate.html.
Next, once you get it installed and working, open Acrobat Reader, click through the usual license stuff and select: Edit > Preferences > General and you will have a dialog like the one below:
This dialog is very important to set up properly for optimized viewing Scribus created PDF's. Display Edge to Edge will give you a larger viewing area to view your PDF.Smooth Text, Smooth Line Art and Smooth Images applies a bit of anti-aliasing when viewing. If you send someone a Scribus created PDF and they complain the text or gradients) look like barbed wire or are "banded", advise the user to enable these settings which are common on all later versions of Acrobat Reader - regardless of platform. There are other cross- platform fonts hints in the PDF Export docs. Cool Type is a feature specific for making PDF readable on LCD laptop screens. It is a way of adjusting the anti-aliasing and subpixel rendedering. Otherwise, leave it unchecked.
If you are creating Scribus files with transparency effects and export PDF 1.4 (PDF 1.3 does not support transparency), you can enable Show Transparency Grid. The other options are mostly for the web browser plug-in. I find splash screens a bother, so I leave that unchecked.
Next, looking at the Reader window above, there are 3 features which can be useful: 1) Thumbnails (which Scribus can optionally embed in the PDF when exporting) are useful for navigating.2) The corner triangle is a short cut to view:Document Info, Document Fonts, Document Security. What we care about is document info. Within Scribus File > Document Info there is a panel to enter author and Title of the document. This shows up in a panel below:
This shows the document size, date of creation and creating application. This info is automatically embedded. Scribus can optionally add author and document title. In addtion, this shows document security strengh.
Document Security Scribus has the ability to encrypt a document with specific user rights. If you enable Security in the PDF export dialog, when you export PDF 1.3, encryption is 40 bit strength. If you export a PDF 1.4 file, encryption is 128 bit strength.
Annotations are non-printing notes, which Scribus can optionally embed within a PDF. This is really simple. Create a text frame. Then add your notes and right click and check "is PDF annotation".
For other "hidden" features, read through the on line help, which is actually a PDF. Beginning with page 10, there are a number of less well known features, including the console command line options. The command line options are specfic to Linux/Unix and include some neat options to export PDF into Postscript. There also hints on settings specific to acroreader in ~/Xdefaults.
Another useful PDF viewer to use with Scribus is GSView which is a graphical viewer/front end to Ghostscript. The latest version (4.4) with Ghostscript 7.05+ work very nicely together allow you to convert PS to PDF, as well as view and convert EPS, PS and PDF files among other tools. Version 4.4 is the first version to really work well under Linux (it was originally developed on Windows). More details are in Using GSView with Scribus
Other viewers: Later versions of Xpdf from http://foolabs.com will do a fine job of displaying and printing Scribus PDF's, including support for PDF 1.4.
For a taste of *some* of the cool PDF tricks Scribus can do,make sure you
read through the sample docs located in the
samples subdirectory of where the Scribus files are
located. Maximize Acrobat Reader, open the file and follow the
instructions. Consider it the first "Easter Egg" in Scribus.;)
First Version - 5 Dec 2002
Updated - 07 July 2003