Will page imposition ever be a built-in feature?

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barkley

I've been wondering for years at this point if Scribus will ever implement simple booklet page imposition. Every time I look it up, I see blog posts and wiki pages on the topic, and people asking about it, going back nearly a decade. The answer seems to always be that no one wants it or it is too hard to bother with, and there is a workaround using a set of external tools. In practice I found the workarounds so frustrating and error-prone that I gave up. I purchased proprietary desktop publishing software a couple years ago instead.

I can't be the only one who went this way. I primarily use desktop publishing software to lay out and print homemade zines. I use a home printer to print out imposed pages myself to be hand-stapled, or use a cheap self-serve printer at a shop with a PDF that is already correctly imposed. I had assumed this was a relatively common use case for desktop publishing, but maybe I'm wrong.

I'm rooting for Scribus and appreciate what it can do, but this missing feature is a real gap for hobbyists. Is the idea dead in the water? Even the most basic booklet imposition would be a huge boon for zine/comics creators who want to create a physical product.

utnik

hi barkley

most .pdf readers support basic booklet imposition. (if yours doesn't, use jpdftweak instead...)
imho there's no need for scribus to do the same.

utnik

mnawij

I really use the simple booklet impose option in InDesign when making proofs for a client, saves me time and that is an important commodity.
I agree, full blown imposition is not needed, but a quick option for proofing a book or zine I would like to see.

https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/indesign/using/printing-booklets.html

Cheers!

mnawij

barkley

Quote from: mnawij on October 09, 2021, 03:10:42 AM
I really use the simple booklet impose option in InDesign when making proofs for a client, saves me time and that is an important commodity.
I agree, full blown imposition is not needed, but a quick option for proofing a book or zine I would like to see.

Yep, it's so easy in InDesign! Affinity Publisher is similarly simple. I'd like for Scribus to do something similar, an option that could be selected from the Print dialog.

Quote from: utnik on October 09, 2021, 12:25:33 AM
most .pdf readers support basic booklet imposition. (if yours doesn't, use jpdftweak instead...)

Adobe Reader does booklet imposition. The built-in PDF reader on my Kubuntu machine (Okulus) doesn't. I don't think we can count on booklet imposition being part of the PDF reader.

Thanks for the link. jpdftweak is cool, and offers some other imposition options I don't usually see (I'm holding onto it for the pocket-fold imposition option). But I think requiring users to download additional tools to do something as basic as booklet printing is a bad user experience. Even more so since the wiki documentation around the topic is scattered and outdated.

Nermander

Imposition is difficult, I think it would just bloat Scribus to try to incorporate impositioning. And such a feature would then only be able to impose Scribus documents. It would seem a lot more useful with a separate software that can import any PDF.

As far as I understand, in almost all professional workflows the impositioning is done in the RIP. So it kind of makes more sense to not have impositioning in Scribus.

Use Scribus to design the document, export to a PDF and from that PDF do the impositioning. It's not the fault of Scribus that Okular does not have booklet printing.

I have to confess that I have not tried many other PDF Viewers than Adobe and Foxit, and they both support booklet printing. Can you give examples of other PDF viewers than Okular that do not support booklet printing?

Here is a thread giving lots of examples how to solve booklet printing under Ubuntu.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/214538/printing-in-booklet-format

toyotadesigner

https://www.winsite.com/Business/Miscellaneous/PDF-Imposition-DE/

For many operating systems. Free download, some nag screens. But definitely better than turning Scribus unstable with unnecessary features.

Nermander

#6
For booklet printing a lot of the available solutions work, but I have not found many solutions that can mange issues like creep and collating marks.

I made some scripts a few years ago (I think they are in the Scribus wiki) that did impositioning of postscript files, including creep, signature numbers and collating marks.

They used pstops for the core work, if someone would write a pdftopdf with the same features as pstops most of my scripts could probably be adopted to work on PDF. But I have not yet found a pdftopdf that supports all the options.

jPDKtweak comes close though, maybe more recent versions support command line options like pstops (I haven't looked into this for several years).