Hello everyone,
I'm working on a book that is similar to a graphic novel (although I favor a relatively free-form and hand-drawn look, so specialized software like Comic Life and Clip Studio seems not suitable). Basically it's a large number of PNGs I've drawn, combined with text blocks (with my own custom font) and vector shapes into a complex layout on each page.
I started this project in Adobe Illustrator (because I have Adobe CS 5.1). The idea was to generate a PDF of each page, then use software like Adobe Acrobat to combine the separate page PDFs into one large PDF which works great.
Then I realized, this seemed silly to do. Since I'm doing a book, surely I want Desktop Publishing software, right? Unfortunately I don't have InDesign (or Quark), so looking for less expensive options, I arrived at Scribus.
First, I am grateful to see this product exists at all, and ready to donate if it becomes a good "fit" for me. Now, I have no experience with InDesign, Quark, etc., and just started using Scribus so I don't know what features to expect. The reason I moved away from Illustrator is wanting multi-page features like:
-Automatic page numbering
-Left vs. right "master page" formatting (although, in Illustrator I simply set up two different templates)
-Ability to insert / delete / shuffle pages and have them correctly change page number, and correctly change left vs. right page format. Potential big advantage for Scribus!
-Master pages with page header - I assume this is a big advantage (although, can be "faked" somewhat in Illustrator).
-Document-wide search/replace if needed (not sure if I can fake this in Illustrator for dozens of separate files, probably not).
-Ideally, blocks of text/graphics should "flow" from one page to the next as I insert content at the beginning. (This sort of "works" in MS Word, except it gets somewhat unreliable when a Word document is built of nothing but text blocks and absolutely positioned images; it's not really designed to work that way, and I gave up on Word for this.)
-Possibly other features I cannot envision that will help with a "large document" (e.g. 100+ pp.).
But, after using Scribus a few days, I notice (I think) some deficiencies of Scribus relative to Illustrator:
-Not nearly as powerful in working with vector shapes; no dynamic vector effects, for example (nothing like "outer glow", or multistroke "appearance", etc.)
-Some awkwardness in working with resizing images on the page (e.g. can't just click & drag as you can with Illustrator, need to work with a "frame" for everything, need the extra step of "adjust frame to image size").
-I read on these forums that Scribus doesn't do well with large documents anyway, so you need to break it into chunks, make PDFs separately, and then combine them. So, for page number and left-vs.-right page layout, there would be some "fiddling" involved, which diminishes those Scribus advantages over Illustrator.
-Also, I am realizing, I suspect there isn't ANY software that allows text blocks/images to "flow" from one page to the next as you insert content above it; this may be an unrealistic fantasy (I'm guessing, 99% of graphic novel artists simply plan all page layouts carefully in advance so they don't need this feature).
If anybody has experience with other DTP software like InDesign, etc., I'm curious if that's where I should be headed next, or, are there features I have not yet discovered in Scribus that would make Scribus worth pursuing further. Or, maybe for my project Illustrator really is the best solution. Thanks for reading!