[scribus] Proper setup for a book

[Gregory Pittman]

On 2/27/20 3:49 AM, Christoph Bartoschek wrote:
> 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?

I think perhaps the best thing is to discuss the issues with your printer, sending a test document with these bleeds and crop marks.
There are situations where one might want an image on the inner part of a left page to spill over to the inner part of the adjacent right page.

Greg