[scribus] Proper setup for a book

Christoph Bartoschek ponto at pontohonk.de
Thu Feb 27 08:49:07 UTC 2020


Hi,

I would like to create a book with Scribus but are unsure about a good
setup. This is what I have:

The two-side pages are 185mm x 230mm.  I want to print them on DIN A4
(210mm x 297mm) and the pages will later be cut by the bookbinder. There
should also be a 3mm bleed on all sides.

The crop marks have the default length of 7mm.  The width of a page would
now be:

185mm (page) + 2*3mm (bleed) + 2*7mm (crop marks) = 205mm.

To get to the 210mm of DIN A4 I add an crop mark offset of 2.5mm. It seems
the offset cannot be set differently for the different sides of the page.
Thus to get to 297mm vertically I set the bleed on top and bottom to 24mm
resulting in:

230mm (page) + 2*24mm (bleed) + 2*7mm (crop marks) + 2*2.5mm (crop offset)
= 297mm

Given this I wonder what the horizontal distance between the left and right
pages should be. I get input for the book from other people and they would
like to send me input that spans left and right. I see two major options
for the horizontal distance:

0mm:  If I get a two page input which is 2*185mm + 2*3mm (bleed) = 376mm
then I can just put it at position (-3mm, -3mm) of the left page and I get
proper bleed for the left and right page even on the inner sides because
the contents of the other page are added to the bleed. However, If I only
want to completely fill one page (e.g the left one) then I see no good way
to add the picture with inner bleed such that it does not appear on the
also on the right page.  Or is there an option that an element is only
considered for one page during export?
One might argue that an inner border does not need bleed at all, but I
would like to have one.

>= 6mm:  Now the inner bleed of one page does overlap with the page
contents of the other page. Properly positioning input on a single page
works fine. However, the two page inputs cause problems. If I just expand
them over the two pages then I loose some content in the middle.  To avoid
this it seems that I have to add the content twice to the book, once for
the left and once for the right page, and then shift and crop them such
that each page shows the right content.  This requires careful
calculations, especially if the input has to be scaled to fit. It's easy to
make mistakes.

For me it seems as if I have to go with >= 6mm as this is cumbersome but
works. I am interested about what other people would choose in such a
situation. Or is there something that I do completely wrong?

Thanks
Christoph
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