But PagePlus only runs on Windows, and I’m not spending much time on Windows these days. Pixelmator and iDraw are excellent for bitmap and vector editing respectively, but iStudio Publisher is still missing a few features it needs to cut the mustard as a serious DTP app.

So I’ve been experimenting with Scribus, which is open-source, cross-platform and (surprisingly) well-documented. Being Qt-based, it’s not as snappy as PagePlus, but it’s usable on slower machines and meets all of my other requirements.

I’ve only found one catch so far: when exporting to PDF, its font outlining is slightly inaccurate (text looks heavier than it should, at least when using Avenir LT’s OpenType fonts). And it can’t embed OpenType fonts. There’s a workaround, though: export from Scribus without outlining or embedding any fonts, then use Ghostscript to do the embedding afterwards. Here’s a little BASH script that looks after it on OS X:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then

    echo "Usage: embed_fonts.sh MyPdf.pdf"
    exit 1

fi

if [ ! -f "$1" ]; then

    echo "Not a file: $1"
    exit 1

fi

command -v gs >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo "Ghostscript not found."; exit 2; }

TEMPFILE="$(dirname "$1")/nofonts.$(basename "$1")"

mv -vf "$1" "$TEMPFILE"

FONTPATH=/Library/Fonts:~/Library/Fonts

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sFONTPATH=$FONTPATH -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode -dDownsampleColorImages=false -dDownsampleGrayImages=false -dDownsampleMonoImages=false -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode -o "$1" "$TEMPFILE"

The post Embedding fonts in a PDF (after creating it) appeared first on luke arms.