[Scribus] Is Scribus ready up to books?

[Magyar Bálint]

Greetings, Ed!

Chiming in to say that I have finished a ~120 page book with mostly text
and some images (and an Appendix for images) without having major
problems or having to resort to lots of workarounds.

Things to bear in mind:

	- USE THE STABLE BRANCH (1.3.3.x). This is probably the most important
thing to take into account. 1.3.4 can be used for fliers and brochures
if you save a lot and don't mind having to re-do a couple of hours of
work if everything goes to hell, but a book is just too much risk to
take with an unstable release.
	- Divide the book into chapters or sections that you save as separate
Scribus documents. You can merge PDF output later with tools like pdftk
or jPDFTweak.
	- Use separate master pages for single-, double-, triple-character (and
so on) page numbers. This is a limitation of the way dynamic page
numbering works in 1.3.3.x, and IIRC it's already been fixed in current
development branch in SVN.
	- Be prepared for slowdowns when navigating or editing text on-canvas
if you have over 20 pages of text in linked frames. This is especially
true if you use automatic hyphenation.
	- Discuss ALL details of the book with your printer BEFORE you do
anything in Scribus with it, and after you've done some sample pages to
them in PDF. Page sizes, cropping, bleeds, colours, marks, everything.
This can save you some mind-splitting headaches later on. :)

That's all I can think of off hand, but I'll make sure to post if
anything else comes to mind.

B?lint

PS: I still owe a Success Story of this book for the Scribus wiki. I'll
get to it, I promise!