[scribus] Taking the plunge with Scribus!

[Ole Madsen]

--- On Wed, 4/21/10, Bruce McIntyre <ooga at shaw.ca> wrote:

> From: Bruce McIntyre <ooga at shaw.ca>
> Subject: [scribus] Taking the plunge with Scribus!
> To: scribus at lists.scribus.net
> Received: Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 4:41 PM
> Hello, Scribus gurus:
> 

Hi All,

I read Bruce's report with great interest.  I too am tasked with producing a 12 page newsletter in two formats, for e-mailing and for printing at the local copy/print shop.  Like Bruce, I use legal paper folded in half, so each page is 7 inches wide and 8.5 inches high, - and I get two pages side by side on a legal sheet in landscape mode.

I find it convenient to produce the 12 pages individually and then export to pdf.  Once I have 12 pdf files, I combine them into one master pdf  with kpdftool.  This part of the process works fine.

However, the print shop, I am dealing with, prefers for me to do the imposition, and I have been giving them separate pdf files for pages 12-1,
2-11, 10-3 and so forth.  This too works OK, but I would like to avoid the extra work of re-arranging the pages.



> 1) Booklet printing.  I think I have this one licked,
> but it is going to take some serious explaining to get your
> average copy-center worker to follow the procedure in
> section 8.4.3 of the manual.  It would be a lot more
> convenient to incorporate booklet printing and imposition
> into the PDF export section of Scribus.  Under
> pressure, I made a silly decision to make full legal size
> pages with the imposition done myself, so my pages were
> 12-1, 2-11, 10-3, 4-9, 8-5, 6-7.  This worked with the
> FedEx Office people, but I found it time consuming to
> convert this to a normal order on half-pages to post a web
> version (in fact, as I write the first draft of this, I have
> one more to convert, two days after the end of the
> tournament, with e-mails wondering where these issues
> are!).  I think with a little experimentation with my
> own printer I can write a document detailing how to do the
> imposition within Acrobat Reader for the Penticton
> people.  But it would be a lot easier to have Scribus
> able to make the printer-version as a PDF export option.


In the Adobe reader there is a provision for booklet printing.  If I select that, input the pdf file with the pages ordered in sequence 1-2-3-4.. and set the paper size to legal landscape, Adobe actually outputs two pages per sheet, properly impositioned, 12-1, 2-11 and so on.

With the exception of left and right margins being wrong, it works on my own printer.  I am wondering, is there a good reason why the print shop can not do this and make the margins come out right?  

I have set the margins to 10 mm all around, but obviously my own printer requires something else.  Do I need to get specific values for the equipment the print shop uses? Or can they override my margin settings? 

Suggestions and comments greatly appreciated.

I use version 1.3.6 on Mandriva 1020 Power Pack.

Cheers 
Ole