Recent posts

#1
General Discussion / Potential new users incoming
Last post by PastaShock - October 01, 2025, 08:48:49 PM
Serif/Canva is making some big announcement about their Affinity Suite of apps on the 30th. A LOT of people think they're going to announce a new version that is subscription licensed instead of a one-time purchase.

I expect this will drive some people to Scribus.

Software should be owned, not rented.
#2
General Discussion / Re: Removing all borders from ...
Last post by PastaShock - October 01, 2025, 08:46:03 PM
Thank you!
#3
PDF Generation / Re: Book cover design: Can I a...
Last post by a.l.e - 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.
#4
PDF Generation / Re: Book cover design: Can I a...
Last post by AdmFubar - 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.
#5
PDF Generation / Re: Book cover design: Can I a...
Last post by Nermander - 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.
#6
PDF Generation / Re: Book cover design: Can I a...
Last post by a.l.e - 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"
#7
PDF Generation / Re: Book cover design: Can I a...
Last post by prcek - 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)

#8
PDF Generation / Re: Book cover design: Can I a...
Last post by Nermander - 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.
#9
Scripts and Plugins / Re: Get position of selected t...
Last post by Lynn - September 28, 2025, 07:25:33 PM
I figured that might be the case - thanks for confirming there's wasn't a scripting variable I was missing.

That all makes sense; and given that my use case is adding bookmarks for ~30 header pages in a digital short-story anthology for my writing club, it will definitely be faster to just use my script as-is than try to untangle locations. I'll generate the bookmarks at the top of the page and move into place manually once they're created.
#10
PDF Generation / Re: Book cover design: Can I a...
Last post by a.l.e - 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.