Pixels and Scribus

[dezcat]

I'm using Scribus at work to create slides for a video. I realize that Scribus 1.4.6 doesn't support pixels, but I'm wondering if there's a way to use it in my workflow so that I don't get nasty, pixellated results.

My workflow:   Inkscape > PNG > Scribus  AND Gimp > PNG > Scribus;

then

Scribus > PNG > Adobe Premiere - my video is 720p (1280 px x 720px)

So, my understanding is that since pixels do not equal points, Scribus does the best it can to draw pixel-dimension graphics on the screen.

Is there a method to adjust my Scribus document size such that X-number of pixels equals an integer number of points?
Clearly 72 px doesn't equal 72 pts.

Thank you for any clues!

[GarryP]

I'm not really sure what you mean when you say "that Scribus 1.4.6 doesn't support pixels". If you mean that Scribus doesn't allow pixels as a unit of measure, that is because Scribus was created to produce PDFs that are destined for printing so it lets you use units of measure that are used in the printing industry.

That shouldn't really be an issue though as the conversion between pixels and points is quite easy.

If you are making titles/slides for a 720p video - 1280x720px - then you can create a document at 1280x720 points and then change the resolution in the export function accordingly (usually 72 dpi). As long as your document has the same aspect-ratio as the output you want then you can simply re-scale it as necessary on export. Just make sure that the images used are at least a good enough resolution.

In other words, a 1280x720px image, when put into an image frame that covers a 1280x720pt page, exported at 72dpi should give you an image that is identical to the original. However, the exported image quality will depend on the import image type (JPG/PNG/etc.) and export image type and quality settings. An imported PNG on a page exported as PNG should result in exactly the same image (theoretically at least).

Does that make sense? Or have I misunderstood the issue?

[dezcat]

Thank you, GarryP...as usual, you nailed it!

[GarryP]

You're welcome.

To digress slightly, if you need to make closing credits for your video you might want to look at using Blender to create something simple pretty quickly with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c-lKxaZg5s (The original poster uses GIMP to create the credit roll but you can use Scribus instead; just create a very long custom-sized page and export the end result to an image.) Once you've done it once, all you need to do is change the image and one or two camera/timing settings and you can re-use it for many projects.

I'm sure there are easier ways to do this but the Blender route will allow you to build on your work-flow to introduce things like parallax scrolling, other effects, and 3D animations when you need them.

Just thought I'd mention this while I remembered it.

[inkuser]

I'm finding that even when scribus is set to the right page dimensions - ie, pts corresponding to the number of pixels, and when exporting at 72 dpi, I still get artifacts...some of them, nasty...

[GarryP]

That's a shame; I've always found the raster export of Scribus to work pretty well. One or two features are "missing" but it usually does the job.
Can you explain - preferably with images - what you've been having trouble with? There might be simple fixes or workarounds.