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Scribus => PDF Generation => Topic started by: Anton on September 27, 2025, 09:49:02 AM

Title: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Anton on September 27, 2025, 09:49:02 AM
Hi everyone

I started using Scribus recently for book creation, and I find it, on the whole, to be a lovely program. After more or less completing the inside contents I have now started working on the cover and have run into a problem.

The printer wants fold marks placed in the slug area (please see the attached PDF for a graphical representation), but Scribus does not seem to have a function for this like InDesign does. In the latter program I would have been able to control the size of the slug area, create small lines and place them at the proper locations to create fold marks. Scribus does not seem to allow any objects outside the bleed area. You can of course place stuff there while working in the program, but it will not show up later in the exported PDF.

Is there a way to solve this? One option would perhaps be to expand the page size to have a larger white area around the book cover, thus creating an artificial slug area. I guess I would then have to draw fold marks and crop marks myself (crop marks would otherwise wind up at the edges of the page, which would be way off). But this seems like a very clunky way to go about it, and it certainly increases the risk for errors.

Is there a better way?
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: a.l.e on September 27, 2025, 10:20:32 AM
If I understand you correctly, this is the result you need to achieve:

with-bleeds.png

(the two rectangle are at the size of the page and bleeds respectively)

If that's the one, I got it by:

Creating a document with 1 cm bleed
Activating the crop marks in the PDF export dialog and defining a 1 cm offset for the printer marks.

Edit:

Wait, no, you seem to just need normal crop marks:

with-bleeds.png

You don't seem to need any offset. Just a normal crop marks.

... Then you might get other issues, but having the crop marks outside of the bleed area does seems to be the default behavior in Scribus.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Anton on September 27, 2025, 12:20:05 PM
The crop marks are not the issue here, Scribus creates them exactly as I want to. The issue is fold marks (marks that show the width of the binding area, where the book cover is to be folded). Did you have a look in the PDF file I attached? The fold marks can be seen on top and bottom at the middle of the page, marked with the letter "B". The problem is that I don't know how to add such marks in Scribus.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Aleks100 on September 27, 2025, 01:42:52 PM
You cannot draw fold lines yourself? Why?
There is a line tool in Sribus, draw a thin line, change type to dashed and that is it.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Anton on September 27, 2025, 02:58:27 PM
Because lines are not supposed to show on the actual book cover. The dotted lines in the PDF I attached are only there to illustrate where the book is intended to be cropped and folded.

The goal is to have fold lines that are not dotted (ending where the bleed area begins).

Same principle for crop marks: we only want them to show until touching the bleed area, not continue as a dotted line on the actual book cover.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Aleks100 on September 27, 2025, 03:11:20 PM
Folding lines goes on bleed area not on design, duh.
If your bleed area is to small, make it bigger.
Everythig (folding lines, crop lines, cmyk marks and scales...) can be included above, or below design.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Anton on September 27, 2025, 05:39:24 PM
Ah, there we have it! Increasing the bleed allowed me to place lines there. Problem solved.

Being a newbie I'm obviously missing simple solutions.

Many thanks to both of you for taking the time and helping me.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Nermander on September 28, 2025, 11:36:50 AM
It would probably be nice if there was an option (set up similar to guides) for adding other marks than crop marks outside the bleed area.

It would be useful also in cases where you have pages with a fold-out part in your design.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: a.l.e on September 28, 2025, 06:12:24 PM
Sorry, for the confusion in my first post.

I try to be more on spot now : - )

A similar topic has been discussed recently:

https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17518

Jean's hint to just do a single page layout seems sensible to me but might deceive some readers.

Personally, I still have the feeling that Scribus should better manage the bleeds for documents with facing pages.
Currently it looks a bit of a mess to me, with the inner bleed areas overflowing on the other side.

And while increasing the bleed area will work, it might confuse the printer, since you will provide a document that does not conform to the specification they provided.

I've opened a ticket for Nermander's proposal:

https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17635

Let's see what Jean thinks of it.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Nermander on September 29, 2025, 04:04:36 PM
Thinking a bit further, maybe guides could have "types".

- Design guides, that is the ones we have today
- Fold guides, generate fold marks (maybe two types, depending on folding direction?)
- Crop guides, generate additional crop marks (the current crop marks are generated from the page edge, essentially the PDF trim box I guess, which could be seen as a special case).

I am not sure about standards for how different marks look, I suspect there are some.

At the same time, I feel the use of crop marks in a PDF is kind of redundant, because the PDF already has a trim box. But I guess that depends on if software used by the printer supports the trim box.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: prcek on September 29, 2025, 05:24:43 PM
Maybe it could be implemented as a "generic" guide type with flags like
"export in the margin", "export in the bleeds", "export as crop mark" (outside bleeds),
with line type, thickness and color properties so there could be a guide styles editor and people could define their own?

Or maybe just allowing generic lines to appear in crop mark area would be enough? (I can imagine someone wanting to have tilted guides for this reason in the future)

Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: a.l.e on September 29, 2025, 07:27:25 PM
We might need to develop it further, but I like the idea of defining types of guides and then process them when exporting to PDF.

For creating fold lines, I like it better than allowing random lines and text to be drawn...

I wonder if it should explicitly be Fold Guides or if it would be "enough" to have a check box attached to the guides that says "Generate print marks"
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: Nermander on September 29, 2025, 07:45:30 PM
Yes, as I said I am not sure if there are standards for marks or if is just sufficient they are lines drawn the same way as the crop marks.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: AdmFubar on September 29, 2025, 07:49:31 PM
Some options to have for doing a cover, or a dust jacket, spine area, and flaps if needed.

found this explanation, thought it might b helpful.

What is Slug (in inDesign)?

It was recently pointed out to me that de didn't cover slug, so here we go. With the caveat that we will be talking about what slug is in InDesign and other similar software – because the term slug has had a few different meanings over the years.

In the old days, when people used lead letters to create a print layout, one type of slug was a piece of spacing material used to space paragraphs.

In modern typesetting programs such as Adobe InDesign, slugs hold information that relates to printing, such as a colour bar, or information or other instructions that are used between editors and designers that won't get printed. For example, if you were working on a magazine layout and multiple team members – it can be helpful to use the slug next to sections to convert information would don't want to be printed, e.g. 'we are waiting for the final article' or 'the advert is going to be changed', or 'the article is in its final form'.

The slug is the area outside the bleed and is mainly extra space for utility and any notes you may need during production that you wouldn't want to print.

Unlike bleed, the slug is not necessary but can be helpful on certain projects.
Title: Re: Book cover design: Can I add fold marks in the slug area?
Post by: a.l.e on September 29, 2025, 09:17:54 PM
Well, here we are talking about things that are outside of the bleed area and that one would want to be printed...

In Scribus you can put things anywhere around the page and they will stay there.

It's probably not a good habit, but you can do it.