[Scribus] Book cover in Document layout

[Louis Desjardins]

Craig Bradney a ?crit :
> On Monday 01 October 2007 20:21:05 Louis Desjardins wrote:
>> Hi list,
>>
>> The recent post from Celso Junior on automated spine in "EasyPose", gave
>> me an idea.
>>
>> Wouldn't it be a nice feature to have at creative level as well? I mean,
>> within Scribus. More often than not there is some graphic involved on
>> that part of the cover, such as the book title, author, collection,
>> publisher's logo and so on. This always has to be done by hand afaik.
>>
>> It would be nice to have this done with input values like with text
>> frames that you can change at will. I would see it in the proposed
>> Document layout in the "New document" dialog: "Book cover". Would be
>> nice if it was as simple as modifying the size of a frame but this would
>> apply to a smaller (narrower) page in a 3-page document (in the order,
>> from left to right, back cover, spine, front cover). Then, if any of the
>> 2 input values change, the spine automatically changes too. If there are
>> already some elements there, Scribus could tell the user that there was
>> a change that requires attention. The program could offer such option as
>> center automatically all elements in the new spine width (if it's
>> larger) or shrink them to fit the new width. As I see it, one could also
>> skip the 2 fields with a check box and enter a width value, depending
>> upon the info available. And automated behavior could also be skipped to
>> let users do just what they want.
>>
>> BTW, the 3-fold option could be given those extra fields. And if we go
>> further, we could simply give all elements the possibility to be of
>> different width, taking then care of the issue with folding. Not all
>> panels of a pamphlet are necessarily equal.
> 
> Spines are something I'm looking into right now, esp wrt paper types and sizes 
> etc.

Interesting coincidence!

We basically need 2 fields, if this can help (I guess you know already 
but others might be curious!).

1. Paper thickness or "Calliper" (this last word is the one we hear most 
of the time in the industry) expressed in 1/1000th of an inch or, I can 
only guess, in mm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_density

2. The number of actual sheets (number of pages divided by 2).

A simple multiplication of each value in both field yields the spine 
thickness.

Paper mills sometimes refer to "Pages per inch" value and provide that 
info for each Text weight in their Paper specs booklets. Then, a simple 
rule of three yields the spine thickness, depending upon the number of 
pages of a given document.

The other way is to simply ask the printer... which is what most 
designers do!

I will be more than interested to see how it turns out!

Cheers!

Louis

> 
> Craig