[scribus] Using Scribus for novels and short stories

[Peter Nermander]

Using LaTeX native might be confusing, but going by LyX is rather easy.

One of my hobbies is bookbinding. When learning bokkbinding you of
course want books to bind. So, I went to Project Gutenberg and
downloaded a few books. They come as plain text files, but formatted
according to a few specific rules. The consistent formatting means
that it is quite easy to write a script to transfer to LaTeX format.
And of course someone has already done that, the script is called
gutenmark.

I did that, imported the LaTeX file into Lyx, made some adjustments
and then exported to a PDF. Took me 10-15 minutes to get The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as a printable PDF.

So I'd suggest that if editing LaTeX manually seems hard, try LyX.


I really can't see any good reason to use Scribus for a book with only
text, and one text frame per page. The reason is that Scribus still
lacks a lot of the automation you want for such a projekt. Scribus
can't do automatic running headers with the chapter name (in LaTeX
it's just one line of code, to get it for all chapters), no automatic
chapter numbering etc etc.

With Scribus you have to more or less design each page manually. With
LaTeX you set up the design "rules" and then LaTeX fills the pages
with text automatically according to the rules you have set up.

So, for projects where many pages have the same design (same margins,
headers etc) LaTeX still beats Scribus. For projects where you want to
be able to play around with the design of each page Scribus beats
LaTeX.

Of course the project CAN be done in Scribus, but it takes a lot more
manual work.

/Peter