[Scribus] Creating booklets with Scribus

[Carol Kankelborg]

At 23:36 -0500 2/14/04, Carl Waldbieser wrote:
>My mom is interested in creating booklets for her crochet patterns, and I
>was wondering if there is an easy way for her to do this using Scribus.  ...

I had this same problem last year, working on a show program.  You can check in
the archives from Sept./Oct. '03.  The thread has the title "What is the best way to
create a booklet?"  I can e-mail you the summary I posted if you wish. 

My quick summary is
  -- I will call "logical" pages, the 5.5 x 8.5" pages of the final booklet and "physical" pages,
      the 8.5x11" sheet of paper the booket is printed on.

   -- it is currently not possible to go from a document of logical-sized pages in 1, 2, 3.. order
      to printing out physical pages that can be folded directly into a booklet with Scribus.

   -- The method of psbook -> psnup -> ps2pdf is not recommended because ps2pdf is not
      as robust a PDF generator as Scribus is and you have to understand the parameters of ps2pdf
      to get output suitable for good printed output.  If you don't need the final PDF (I did), maybe
      this method will work just fine for you.  However, this method was useful for drafts of the
      booklet as I worked.

  -- I created a Sribus document with logical pages in sequential order and when I was ready to
     print the final version, I created a new document of physical pages and placed the logical
    pages in the order needed to get the right printed output (e.g. for 8 logical pages, 8, 1, 2, 7, ...).
    This process is called "imposition" -- a new word I learned trying to figure all this out.  The
    exact steps as given by Peter Linnell, are in the archives.  This process can probably be
    automated by Python scripting, but I'm not up to the challenge of that yet. 

 --  A note of caution.  "intrigeri" pointed out in Dec. '03 (and if he's reading this, I apologize
     for not responding to his post earlier) that the above process breaks any chained text boxes
     in the original logical-page document.  I've not verified this, but I don't doubt it.  It was
    not an issue for me because I did it as my last step before generating the final file.  I did not
    plan on editing the file after imposing it.  If you plan on editing the booklet after this final
    imposition, you need to take this into account.

-- Even with the inconvenience of manually imposing the booklet for final printing, it was
    worth it to be able to work with the document with the pages in sequential order for most
    of the time.  The previous two years I used Word to create the show program and worked with
   the document already laid out on physical pages.  Believe me, that is a royal pain.  Scribus
   was a God-send last year.

Well, maybe that wasn't such a quick summary, but hopefully you can learn from my experience.

    

-- 
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Carol Kankelborg                           | There are 10 kinds of people: those who
cckborg1 at alumni.lehigh.edu         |  understand binary and those who do not.