[scribus] Using Scribus for a newsletter

[John Culleton]

On Tuesday 07 October 2008 06:21:56 pm Joe Ward wrote:
> > I would save the file from Scribus in postscript format, then use
> > the psutil tools to set up pagination for booklet printing. Then
> > convert to pdf.
> >
> > Here is my (linux) routine for making booklets for church.  For
> > each $1 you can substitute the root name of your file.  Linux
> > does this automatically. My home printer takes ps files. But
> > ps2pdf is a simple extra step:
> >
> >
> > psbook $1.ps $1b.ps
> > echo 'psnup'
> > psnup -2 -ptabloid -Pletter $1b.ps $1p.ps
> > echo 'psselect'
> > psselect -o   $1p.ps $1o.ps
> > psselect -e -r  $1p.ps $1e.ps
> > lpr $1o.ps
> > echo 'switch paper'
> > read x
> > lpr $1e.ps
> > rm $1p.ps $1e.ps $1o.ps $1b.ps
> > John Culleton
>
> That sounds very interesting.  I assume you run the script from the
> Script tool in Scribus. How do you save it into a file to run it?
> Do you just save it in something like notepad and give it a
> particular suffix? -Joe

I use the Vim editor for scripts, which is a very powerful editor that 
works on plain text files like Notepad does.  I run the script 
separately against a PostScript file from any source, such as Scribus 
or TeX. 

Remember this is a Linux script , and Linux careth not about suffixes. 
I saved it as a file called script1a. Then I did this command to make 
it executable:
chmod 777 script1a
I call it with the name of the PostScript file but without the suffix. 
For file named foo.ps I type

script1a foo

The word foo will substitute for every occurrence of $1 in the script. 
I don´t know if MSDOS bat files can have a similar substitution 
facility. 

AFAIK MSWindows at the command line still has the facilities and 
limitations of early MSDOS for the most part. MSDOS in turn had a 
very restricted interface loosely based on early Unix.

Linux however has the full facilities of the Unix interface, and many 
of the later Unix utilities from Berkeley Source Distribution (BSD) 
etc. were just transferred over and recompiled.  From the graphic 
windowed interface Linux and MSWindows have roughly comparable 
capabilities, with Linux copying the Windows way of doing things, but 
from the command line Linux has many more facilities.  The Linux 
command line has evolved, the MSDOS command line has not. 

The *nix way of doing things tends to break tasks down into individual 
components, and use a special purpose program for each.  

These differences in capabilities leads to different work habits.  
Windows users work from the gui and seldom or never use the command 
line whereas Linux users have command line windows open all over the 
place, and will often use a command line to call graphical programs 
like Scribus. Scripting is also far more powerful in Linux than in 
MSDOS, constituting a kind of programming language. 

My script is best used as just an example of how the individual 
command line programs can be sequenced and the parameters available 
to each.   



-- 
John Culleton
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