[Scribus] Imposition Tools and PDFEditor Application

[Tom Lechner]

Hi,

Julian Robbins wrote:
> I found the tool 'laidout' the other day. I'm not an expert in this
> whatsoever, but wondered why this is never mentioned? It is GUI  
> driven which might help some people who are not so happy with cmd  
> line perhaps. It a bit quirky looking, but is another tool that might  
> help ..

avox wrote:
> No, seriously, I only heard about laidout a few weeks. It looks very  
> interesting. Does anyone have experience with using laidout for  
> imposition?

I use Laidout to lay out my cartoon books and spherical photos! I've  
made 2 40 page booklet imposed books of cartoons (imported 7M tiffs)  
with it. Its very rough and questionable gui doesn't phase me, but then  
I wrote Laidout, so I might be biased. Laidout is almost totally  
untested by people who are not me as far as I'm aware. I'm in the  
middle of laying out a 160 page book of 7M tiff cartoons. Nothing like  
a large project to really point out the weaknesses of a program! Normal  
editing seems snappy, but the spread editor drags.

I hate to just blab about Laidout here, so let me mention that I wrote  
a simple Scribus script to export all the pages of a Scribus document  
to EPS files at once (i have no experience adding to wikis, or I would  
put it in the Scribus wiki):
http://www.laidout.org/other/exportEpsFromScribus.txt
(rename to exportEpsFromScribus.py)
These EPS can then be mass imported all at once into Laidout for  
impositioning. I'm also almost done making a Scribus export option in  
Laidout.

Also, "mesh" (patch) gradients and image warps of Laidout can be  
exported as EPS, which can then be imported to Scribus via the Get  
Image option (NOT the import EPS menu option under File). I  
successfully made a PDF from Scribus that contained such an exported  
color patch and image warp, though I don't know if Scribus rasterizes  
that EPS or somehow converts it to PDF. PDF and Postscript natively  
allow bezier based mesh gradients. Patch editing controls in Laidout  
still need a lot of work, though.

Tom
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http://www.laidout.org
http://www.tomlechner.com