[scribus] Scribus and VioVio -- success

[Murray Strome]

Some time ago, there was quite a bit of discussion about problems related to producing photo books for publication by VioVio using Scribus. I have forgotten all the details about the problems people had, but I thought I would share my experience.

I have just received my 72 page, premium hard cover, image wrap photo book from VioVio. I used Scribus to create it, and any problems with it lie with my own lack of artistic talents, not any problems with creating the pages, combining them, uploading them, etc.

Thus, I thought I would like to share my experience with others, especially those who may have experienced difficulties in the past. I am using LINUX. It took me over a year to find (scan in many cases) and organize the photos, then to create the pages so I used at least three different versions of Scribus during this time-frame. Also, I used several different flavours and releases of Ubuntu over this time period (Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu and versions 9.04, 9.10, 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04).

First, I set up my directory structure for the project. In the project directory, I had three sub-directories: Images, Text, and Scribus. Within the Images folder, I had many sub-folders to hold the images of different sections of the book.

I created a number of "Templates" for various combinations of photos (e.g. full page, different numbers of photos per page in various layouts, different backgrounds, etc.)

All of these layouts used the dimensions provided by VioVio on their web pages for the particular size of book that I was creating.

I created the book in sections that had 1-5 pages each.  For each of these, I created a PDF file.  I then used the script "compress-newsletter" at http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Web_optimised_PDF to shrink the file sizes to an acceptable size. This reduces the size by a factor of 10-15. I believe that this is probably the most critical step in creating an acceptable PDF for VioVio. 

In my case, following the application of this script, I delete all the *.meta files (this should be included within the script but isn't right now). When you run:

compress-newsletter.pl <FILE_NAME>.pdf

it creates a new file called <FILE_NAME>.new.pdf

I usually delete <FILE_NAME>.pdf and rename <FILE_NAME>.new.pdf to <FILE_NAME>.pdf

When all the pages are completed, I used pdftk to combine all of the PDF files into a single one, which  I uploaded to VioVio.  

In fact, I really did this in stages. I just kept adding the new pages to the main file as I went along, rearranging the pages as required.

Once I uploaded the interior of the book (in my case a single 72 page, double sided book), I was ready to create the cover. VioVio gives you the dimensions of the template for this.

I then used Scribus to create the cover, including a collage of many of the photos in the book, the text for the front and back covers and the spine.  They like the cover to be a JPG image, so I think I exported my Scribus created cover as a TIF file, which I then "tweaked" a bit with the GIMP, and then saved it as a JPG file, which I uploaded to VioVio.

I was very pleased with the resulting book, although I would do the layout a lot differently next time around. I find it difficult to visualize how such a book will look when printed from looking at the PDF files and on-screen previews.  Any defects in the book are caused by my lack of experience and artistic talents. Thus, I am very pleased with the work that VioVio did for me.  

I think that the price was reasonable (about $56) for the high quality printing and binding for a 72 page, hard-cover book.

My only complaint about VioVio is that I found the customer support to be a bit frustrating. It seems to be available only via E-Mail, and all too often, they also tend to send URLs that I had already looked at instead of answering my specific questions!

I hope this might help anyone else who might have had problems with Scribus documents and VioVio.

Murray

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