[scribus] Imposiion (Was: The Scribus target)

[Lars O. Grobe]

Taking the open source nature and modularity of the free software world 
into account, plus the pdf-centred workflow in Scribus (which reflects 
what the industry is in at the moment imho), even though I needed it 
some weeks ago - I think imposition is not a tool that has to be integrated.

In these pdf-days, you do not create a book any more in DTP - you create 
a document. This can be viewed on screen, be printed in offset or on a 
a4 laser printer - you do not know it when you create the pdf - and that 
is the nature of a device independant document format.

We need a tool doing imposition, but this is its own step in the 
workflow, and it is run when printing the document - without changing 
it, as it depends on the device. So it is its own element in the chain. 
Some folks have it already in their printer driver, some use unix 
postscript tools. The big advantage is that the job of the one doing the 
print-out, knowing the devices, doesn't collide with the job of the 
document creator. And it does not matter if I create my pdf in Scribus, 
Openoffice, Inkscape, Tex...

So maybe work has to be done on creating a really nice imposition tool, 
with previews, templates, a very graphical GUI showing the user what is 
going to happen. But I do not think that this should be part of Scribus, 
Openoffice or any other creator tool. Actually there are already tools, 
but the "perfect one" yet has to be developed ;-)

CU Lars.