Printing Books and other questions

[Ged]

Thanks for your DTP program which I have just found today.  Before downloading Scribus, may I get a few questions answered from users please.   

• How does Scribus fare with full size books?  I have created 'saddle stitch' booklets, and glue-bound books of about 100 pages, between A5 and A4.
• Are Pagemaker 6.5 files recognized, or do we have to re-create pages from scratch?
• Does Scribus export finished publications to pdf for printing?
• Is 'leading' , 'tracking' , 'text wrap', and such layout functions as good as PM65?
• Does Scribus do website code, or do we need a separate HTML editor for that?

I'll probably have a few more questions, but that will do for now.  I dont need the power of Adobe Indesign, but I need to know that it is as good (or better) than Publisher or Pagemaker.  Thanks for any comments.

Ged

[GarryP]

Hello Ged.

For examples of what Scribus can do, your best first stop should probably be here: http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Success_stories There are pages of testimonies going back over ten years showing what some people have created. And this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.

As far as I know Scribus can't import PageMaker files but if you could export from PM to another format it might be possible to not have to start again totally from scratch.

The main function of Scribus is to make PDFs ready for printing and it has plenty of professional output options.

For formatting functions it really depends on what you expect. Scribus has all kinds of typographical functions but they might work differently to what you're used to. Not necessarily worse - and maybe sometimes better - but differently. All of the functions you mentioned are supported - amongst many others - but they might be handled in a different way. Whether that is "as good as" would be for you to decide.

Scribus doesn't really handle HTML - as such - and can't create web pages (if that was what you were asking). It creates XML which could - theoretically - be converted to HTML but there's no native HTML support.

One thing that people coming from other products have said is that Scribus works differently from what they were used to but once they get used to the different way they generally have no problems.

As Scribus is free to download, why not just give it a try and see what you think? As long as you download from the official site http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Download you can be sure there will be no nasty surprises "along for the ride".

[Ged]

Thanks for the links and info.  Ive downloaded now, and will give it a whirl.

As far as I know Scribus can't import PageMaker files but if you could export from PM to another format it might be possible to not have to start again totally from scratch.

Perhaps I should just cut'npaste the text into Word, re-format the text,  then re-import the graphics?  Problem is Word may not like the formatting.  Can you suggest a suitable file type, before pasting into Scribus?

[JamesH]

I just recently, using a program called PagePlus, self published my book "Dreams Unpeaceful". Since then, I have been reconstructing the book in Scribus, and I have to say, that the process is actually quite easy. And I think the main reason is because of how simple it is to create text styles. What I have been doing is opening the PDF of my book, selecting the text, and pasting it directly into Scribus' text frames. From there it is simply a matter of using text styles to re-create the original look of the text.

[Ged]

What I have been doing is opening the PDF of my book, selecting the text, and pasting it directly into Scribus' text frames. From there it is simply a matter of using text styles to re-create the original look of the text.

I feel it might be a little safer if I "cleaned" the text formats first, by putting it through a basic editor like Notepad.  So, Ive experimented by copying one of my smaller pm6.5 files on to Notepad, then saving it as a txt file.

Problem is, Scribus refuses to open it.   txt files are not shown on "Files of type".  Strange?    Any suggestions on what file type I should save it to, in order to open it as "clean" text?

[Ged]

Ahh,  Text frame > Import

... Thanks James   

[GarryP]

It's always a good idea to "clean" the text by putting it through a basic text editor first. That way you make sure that there are no control characters/sequences that other software might use for formatting etc. in the text you put into Scribus.

Also, while Scribus can import Paragraph Styles - up to a point, but not Character Styles - it's best to keep the formatting within Scribus by creating the relevant styles there. It's worth noting that word processors have "bold" and "italic" formatting that Scribus doesn't, so this sort of imported formatting won't work anyway. (Scribus does it properly by making you use real bold and italic variants instead of "wrangling" the font.)

P.S. The easy way to import text into a frame is to right-click the frame and choose "Get Text...".

[JamesH]

If you're interested in using Microsoft Word for all of your editing, then you could save files out of that program as .odt (open document text). Scribus seems to like that file type very much.