[scribus] Scribus!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:07:05 +0100
> Mr. Beast wrote:

> > My own conversion to Scribus makes a good example of my point. I'm a 
> > little surprised at how awkward imposing the pages is turning out to be. 
> > That's a lot of time I could be spending elsewhere. In my opinion in 
> > order for Scribus to differentiate itself as a professional DTP and not 
> > just another light weight office graphics package, Scribus has to be 
> > able to easily handle large multi page documents (such as books and 
> > magazines) intended for professional printing. So far all the 
> > information I have read on printing 2 up double sided has been geared 
> > toward home printers. The notion that a professional will be printing 
> > thousands of copies of a multi page documents on their home printer is 
> > just painful to read.

Ahem. It appears you have a misapprehension of the economics of
printing and publishing.

I operate a home-based book publishing business which earns me a
comfortable living with only a few hours a day of work. I print
everything on laser. I even print my covers on laser. I have a
laminator for the covers, and two binding machines. I don't produce my
own paper and toner, but everything else is done in-house (literally). 

I print the guts of the books (up to 550 pages) on ancient Laserjet
8000s. My cost per page is about 1/4 of one cent for toner. Repairs and
replacements for the printers are negligible, as everything is
available on eBay for a song.

The last I checked industry statistics, the crossover point for cost
between laser and press is 8,000 copies for black and white and 2,000
copies for color. I typically print 200 copies of a book at a time. I
print from PDFs.

So far I have not used Scribus for a book layout, but I'm hoping I'll
be able to on the next one.