[Scribus] Creating lulu single-piece covers -- results

[D. R. Evans]

John Culleton said the following at 04/11/2008 08:11 AM :

> 
> Lulu often uses LSI for a printer,. Two things are noteworthy when 
> using LSI:
> 
> Instead of placing the ISBN bar code it is better to leave it blank 
> and let them set it. If you do that then they will rasterize the page 
> and then place the bar code.  If you put it on then the bar code gets 
> rasterized with the rest of the cover.  Whether you can work this 
> through Lulu as an intermediary is a question.

Almost certainly not. Lulu is quite explicit about one-piece covers: they
will make no changes whatsoever to what you submit.

> 
> LSI specifies a standard for pdf of PDF/X1:2001 which corresponds 
> roughly to PDF 1.3. This does not allow for transparencies, layers, 
> gradients etc.  To retain these features the Scribus output can be 
> saved at a newer model and then the following ImageMagick command can 
> be tried:
>  convert -density 600 scribus.pdf -flatten prepress.pdf
> 
> I have not tested this myself. 
> 

That sounds like it's probably roughly equivalent to the final process I
described as being successful (which is essentially a manual flattening).
Having found something that works, I'm going to stick with that, although
others might want to experiment with other methods of achieving the same
result.

I hope that at some point there will be a "flatten" capability built into
Scribus, but in the meantime it seems like either your method or mine
should suffice.

  Doc

PS There is also the minor issue that lulu doesn't actually promise to use
a particular POD printer; in fact, they don't even promise to use the same
one all the time (and there are hints on some of their pages that not all
orders are fulfilled by the same printer).