[scribus] Book layout and printing

[Murray Strome]

On Mon, 2/23/09, "Adrian Maggio" <adrian.maggio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> hi all!
>
> does anyone have any experience with book/script layout and printing?
>
> i am preparing a script for a play i am directing, and i was wondering if
> any of you have done something similar with scribus?
>
> thanks,
> adrian
>
>
--- 

Hi Adrian,

This is not exactly a direct answer to your question, but I wondered if you had looked at Celtx:

http://celtx.com/

I have not actually used it myself yet, but it appears to be an extremely useful and powerful tool for writing scripts for plays, movies, and more.

Once you have your script written (however you do it), you could use the results to prepare a book, if you wish.

I would say the most important lesson I have learned about using Scribus to create a book is to break it into chunks that are no longer than 20 pages each (I would say keep it to 12-16 pages if you can).  Once I have the sections prepared, I usually use external tools to put the resulting PDF files together.

Tools (in LINUX) that I have found to be very useful for this are:

pdftk  -- lets you combine pieces of different PDF files into a new one
pdftops-- converts PDF to PostScript
psbook -- puts the pages in proper order if you are imposing (e.g. for a booklet)
psnup  -- creates a booklet (e.g. if you started with 8.5X11 pages in your original file and want a booklet that has two pages 5.5X4.25 on each side of a sheet of paper)
ps2pdf -- converts the resulting PostScript file to PDF
compress-newsletter.pl  -- dramatically reduces the size of the PDF file (I usually get about a 10:1 reduction in file size with no noticeable degradation in printed quality).

All of these are available in standard repositories for LINUX (I think it is something like psutils which includes most of them).

The compress-newsletter.pl script is available from:
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Web_optimised_PDF

I hope that some of this information will be helpful to you.

Murray