[scribus] New to publishing, Scribus, and this list

[Roger]

So, I am now going to get started with some basic photo and text layout
and then start making a list of question I am unable to answer for myself.

But my first question is:
Is this do-able for a newbie? Or am I nuts?

Thanks,
-Mike

Hi Mike
Welcome to Scribus.
Short answer, yes it's very doable and not as difficult as you may imagine.

If it were me, I would make separate cut and paste text files of each text and 
each caption and heading that you want on each page ready for inserting into 
text frames then put empty text boxes on each page containing the name of the 
text file only as a reference.

Then select each photo or photos for each page and place image box/es with an 
outline around each where each image will go, but don't insert the images yet.
Once the layout is as you envisage it, then paste the text, change the font, 
sizes colours etc.
Make headings and captions for the images in separate text boxes.

You will find the dialogs and menus for text and image boxes in the <F2> 
Properties dialog, experiment first for a few moments.
Its not going to take you long to get a handle the way Scribus works.

With photos, these can be high quality right down to low resolution jpegs, I 
would experiment to obtain the lowest quality images that produce the best 
printed result. You can scale the images to the correct size for the image box 
on the page in either Gimp or photoshop and reduce the resolution to jpg or for 
higher quality use png, I have found that occasionally 150 x 150 resolution 
produces good images and on others I use 200 x 200 or 300 x 300 dpi, it depends 
on the image and the paper it's printed on.

Hope this helps
Roger