[scribus] Question about photo DPI, book margins

[Gregory Pittman]

On 03/02/2011 03:40 PM, Pam daMonium wrote:
> Now that I can make a family newsletter, my next project will, of course, be a published book! .^_^.
>
> A family member wants me to help her create a cookbook that she can sell from her farmstand at NYC metro-area farm markets (and local stores, online, etc). It doesn't need to be an award-winner, but does need to look good considering the upscale demographic of the customers. She will taking the photos herself of produce growing on her farm. The book will take the next year to produce as she follows the growing seasons and develops recipes (she's also a professional chef).
>
>   It seems that this kind of project is right up Scribus' alley. What resolution do list members recommend for the images? They will be of growing crops, people working and harvesting the crops, food preparation, and finished dishes. What book margins are used for such a project, whether glue bound or spiral?
>
> Please remember that I am inexperienced with jargon and haven't worked as a graphic designer since before DTP came along. Thank you for your suggestions!
>
For many of the questions you ask, a sense of good design, disregarding 
DTP, is what you need.

The quality of the pictures is an essential feature, so making pictures 
with good clarity of the content, and good lighting is important. You 
can always post-process, but you have to have good material to work 
with. Depending on the image content, usually 150-300 DPI is adequate, 
especially for something like you're talking about.

As we have said often, in a book-sized document with a lot of pictures, 
dividing up the document into 20-30 page chapters/chunks will make it 
easier to work in Scribus. You then assemble the PDF output into one big 
PDF outside of Scribus.

Make some dummy pages to decide about the format/layout that works for 
you, and review similar books to see what you like and don't like about 
some given layout for ideas. You should already know things like not 
using a large number of different fonts, and focus on legibility, not 
how pretty a font is to you.

Greg