[Scribus] Imposition support?

[Peter Nermander]

(Primary question at end, first comes an introduction:-)

I have just found Scribus and begun to look at it. My interest lies primarily in creating own books, booklets etc for private or similar use. It started with bookbinding a couple of years ago and if you're into bookbinding you soon get into impositions, folding and stuff.

I have been printing books (from Project Guteberg) by the following method:

Convert to LaTeX using GutenMark
Import into Lyx and do some fine tuning (primarily I change to KomaScript book class, since I live in Europe)
Export to postscript

Then I use pstops from psutils to create impositions.

My first imositions were made "by hand" (calculating relocations and writing the command line manually), but that was a real pain.

I then sat down and wrote a perl script (I'm not good at perl, but I like it:-) to handle things for me. The script I have now takes the imposition from an include file (so to make a new imposition you just make a new include file) och spits out the finished postscript file (it calls pstops with a loooong command line). The impositions are defined by a "table", for example an 8-page imposition (4 pages on each side of the sheet) is a 2x2 table. For each cell I just state which page (from within the sheets page range) shall be of front and which shall be on the rear. I also state the rotation and towards which edge of the cell it shall be adjusted (important in case the page size does not match the cell size). The script then calculates all the page relocations inlcuding adjustements.

The script can handle impostions with to sheets on top of eachother folded together and also "magazine" impositions (document spread into sheets that are all folded together).

Could my script be of interest for including imposition support into Scribus? I was thinking it could give some ideas on how it could be made.

(I also have an ugly script printing colation marks and signature numbers, but it just inserts some postcript code at the beginning of each page so it's not very complicated. It does use the same imposition include file as the other script though, the location of the signature number and colation bar is defined in it.)

/Peter