[scribus] 2 questions: master pages & text flow odd/even pages

[John Culleton]

On Friday 07 August 2009 05:08:44 pm John Morris wrote:
> John Culleton wrote:
> >Scribus is not the DTP tool for all uses. The page length
> > limitation is only part of it. There are the questions of
> > footnotes, of indexes  (sometimes multiple in the same
> > document), of multiple TOCs in the same document, of oversize
> > pdf files and so on. For those needs TeX is the instrument of
> > choice at least for me. But I love Scribus for book covers,
> > newsletters and the like.
>
>    As I mentioned before, I'm very new to Scribus, so still
> trying to understand exactly what Scribus is. So far, I have
> understood Scribus to be more like Quark XPress or InDesign than
> Illustrator or Freehand. What about Scribus makes you prefer it
> over a straight vector drawing package such as Inkscape (of which
> I know almost nothing except that it is not very close to 1.0
> yet) in the open-source universe or Illustrator in the commercial
> universe? I'm relatively new to most open-source products, but I
> have been doing DTP with commercial products for some years. I
> would much prefer to use Illustrator, Freehand or CorelDraw to
> design covers over Quark, PageMaker or InDesign. My understanding
> is that Scribus is more like the latter three products than the
> former three products.
>
> Thanks,
> John
>
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You are probably correct in your evaluation. I sometimes call 
Scribus a program to do "Quark Jobs" or at least those that aren't 
too lengthy. 

For book covers Scribus is quick. 
1. You create the page size and the necessary guides with my 
template generator:
http://wexfordpress.net/template.html
2. You create a background layer with either a background color or a 
background image.
3. You add additional layers for text items. For titles and such you 
can kern the type positively or negatively.  You can also stretch 
or compress the type. For the back blurbs the story editor is 
reasonably convenient. Rotation of the spine text and then placing 
it is easy.  You can blend together an illustration and a color 
panel. To blend two images together however requires Gimp.  
4. You can save the output in  pdf 1.3, 1.4, or 1.5. In addition you 
can save it in tiff. ICC profiles can be applied. 

I can put a cover together in an hour or two.  I'll spend more time 
than that just looking for the right cover photo or art image. 

I have heard from others who have used both Illustrator and Scribus 
that Scribus was faster for covers.

 See the following for some Scribus cover examples:
http://wexfordpress.net/illos.html

For more details see below.
-- 
John Culleton
Create Book Covers with Scribus/e-book $5.95
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html