[Scribus] Printing hopeless confusion

[John Jason Jordan]

(All sizes below in inches, US paper sizes.)

The job is a book cover. Page size is 9 by 12, landscape. This is for a book that will be printed half-letter, that is, 5.5 inches wide by 8.5 inches high. Book covers must span both the front and the back, plus the spine, plus there must be a bit extra for bleed after trimming. I like 1/4 inch extra all around for bleed. The spine will be about 1/2 inch. Therefore, the image size must be 9 by 12.

The job will be printed on a Xerox Phaser 7400 DN. This printer can print right to the edge of the paper. It can also print on custom paper sizes up to 12.25 by 47.25. I have purchased cover stock and cut some of it down to 9 by 12. I could cut it to different sizes, as the parent sheets are 25 by 40. I have a 25 inch guillotine. 

I have created the cover in Scribus 1.3.3.8 (Ubuntu Feisty) and it looks great on screen. Printing is driving me up the wall.

The problem is too many options, and many of them are not defined (no documentation). I haven't done the math, but there are at least a hundred different settings in the various print dialogs and some of them have a dozen different options. The possible permutations are more than I could try in a lifetime. At this point I have spent three hours trying, and I have a stack of about a hundred incorrectly printed copies. I could keep on trying, but it's time to ask for suggestions.

Some of the incorrect output:

* Completely blank sheets
* Landscape, but only two thirds of the page printed with a two inch margin at the top and the left
* Miscellaneous other misalignments
* Portrait when I specified landscape
* Landscape when I specified portrait
* Almost always have a .2 inch margin, even when I specified no margin (only once I got no margin, and only on the bottom)

The closest I can get is an image truncated to about 11.6 inches wide by 8.6 inches high.

Besides trying lots of different settings in the print dialog boxes, I have also tried enlarging the page size. When I exceed 9 x 12 the output is usually a blank page.

Any suggestions welcome.