Can Header show different content on alternate pages?Footnotes new each chapter?

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swarup

I've got a 250-page book containing 37 chapters, which is ready to be formatted for print publishing.

1) Can this be done treating the 250-page file as one file, and yet having the program recognize the separate chapters within the file such that the footnotes in each chapter are numbered anew starting with '1'.

2) Again treating the 250-page file as one file, can the header at the top of each page show the chapter name on the left hand pages and the book name on the right hand pages. This would of course require a different chapter name on the left hand pages for each chapter.

Nermander

Scribus does not have much automatic features, if you want a header at the top of each page to show the chapter name you will have to write the chapter name there. (But you can do it on a master page, and use a different master page for each chapter).

From your questions I don't think Scribus is the tool you should use, I think a PDF generated from Open/Libre Office would be a better solution for you.

swarup

Extremely helpful - thank you!
I'll probably go ahead and use Libre Office then-- it appears to have the needed tools.

Nermander

It is of course possible to do in Scribus, but for the task you described I personally think it's to much manual work.

jack_cat

I don't, myself, see any problem with importing your book into
Scribus to finish the layout, but there are a few caveats.

The footnote issue is the biggest problem I have had with Scribus.

The bottom line is that Open Office does great footnotes, and if
you have footnote or endnote heavy material, then all editing should
be done in OO. However, endnotes are a good deal easier to import
into Scribus than are footnotes, because OO puts all the end-notes
together on one or more pages at the end of the file, and they can
be easily copied and pasted as a complete chunk. This is ideal
for end-notes at the end of each Chapter (which makes for a more
readable text IMO), because then the notes
can be in the same Scribus file as their linked text, even though the
links are no longer dynamic once imported into Scribus.
I usually do this with a lot of copy and paste instead of trying to
import the whole file.

It's a little more of a pain to assemble all of the endnotes at the end of
the book. In this case, I would put the notes in a separate scribus
file to be exported to pdf and then assembled with the pdfs of the
chapters and other divisions such as front matter, indices, whatever.

Then, as far as the other question about headers and footers,
I include these in individual master pages for each chapter,
and I keep each chapter in a separate scribus file, so usually there
are only 3 master pages per chapter, whereas you might end up
with many in a large file. I think that any content that must be
repeated on multiple pages must go in a master page, and you can
have a lot of master pages if you want to.

If your content really is finished and needs no more editing,
then IMO Scribus is the appropriate tool, because it has so
many more flexible layout options than a word processor.
In this case, you import your files into Scribus and do the
layout work.

BUT, if your content requires more editing and you try to do that
within Scribus, and it involves adding or deleting footnotes, you
will be in manual footnote (or endnote) re-numbering hell.

The day that a book can be assembled in one single Scribus file
which automatically can generate TOC and index and end-notes
is a long way off, it appears, I certainly await the day.
Until then there is a lot of manual work to do on all of these
book sections which one might hope could be generated automatically.

jack

dragonfly

In between other tasks, I am exploring a whacky idea to use CherryTree as a front end editor to Scribus.

https://www.giuspen.com/cherrytree/

The idea is to map content from CherryTree nodes into Scribus objects.  That is separating content from layout.

For example a CherryTree document (XML format, not SQL) can have a multi-level tree structure of nodes and the idea I have is to map from CherryTree nodes into Scribus pages, masterpages, layers, textframes, imageframes, rasterfames.

Just an idea at this stage.