[Scribus] Publishing question

[Owen]

On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:38:57 -0700 (PDT)
eklektik <joz_mak at yahoo.ca> wrote:

Why do you send this stuff?
>   
>    <!--
> #toc,
> .toc,
> .mw-warning {
> 	border: 1px solid #aaa;
> 	background-color: #f9f9f9;
> 	padding: 5px;
> 	font-size: 95%;
> }

<snip>

>      -->

>    I have some questions regarding publishing. I am in the process of creating a book about graphic techniques in scribus. 
> 
> I've already made lots of screenshots that I intend to use in the book as illustrations. 
> 
> The screenshots are made in imagemagick in high resolution output 300 dpi. 
> 
> But I have to reformat them, which I do in the gimp. 
> 
> Can anyone with experience advise me how the gimp images are going to turn out in the print since the gimp has only 8bit color depth. 
> 
> How is Scribus pdf output is effected by these image qualities. 
> 
>    
> 
>    I am going to publish the book with lulu and their faq says that the images can be saved in high resolution jpeg formats in order to keep the file size down. 
> 
> Does anyone has experience publishing in this image format?



You should think through what you have done.

First of all you have taken a screen shot. Screens range from around 75 dpi to 100 dpi. So the information content in your images is based on that dpi figure.

Resizing to 300 dpi needs to be done with the final output in mind.

Next you want to think about how the printer is going to print the image. If Lulu say they want 300 dpi images, fine, go with that, you really need to check that specification.

Lastly, in the print business, there aren't that many colours, you have a few tubes of ink that you can mix up and getting it right is a bit of a black art. If you are going to print on a high end laser, then again you have a limited number of colours and a whole host of other things to contend to to get it right.
So Gimp's 8 bit "problem" is irrelevant to printing on paper. However, if you into movie making, then you have a need for something better, try Cinepaint 

jpeg images should be just fine from a screen shot. If however you were using a million dollar camera and printing in some high print quality magazine, you would probably go to some other format for processing.

Scribus pdf output I suspect obeys the maxim that garbage in equals garbage out. Don't look at the pdf output on your 72 dpi screen, do a draft print on you 300 dpi printer, Then you will see where you are heading



Owen