Hi, On Wednesday 31 August 2005 12:36, J. MacPhail wrote: > Hello, people. > > I'm attempting to lay out a 48-page magazine that was previously > done in PageMaker. Despite fairly extensive past experience with > word processing and typesetting with plain TeX, I am new to DTP. > So I have a lot of questions. > > 1. Margins. What confuses me is that the margin setting seem to be > used in two different paradigms: for some people, the margins are a > "rule" -- defining a clipping region outside of which nothing is > printed; for others, the margins are a guideline, and the clipping > region is the edge of the page. My inclination would be to use > margin settings as guidelines for the main body of the material, so > I will have a headline above the margins. Is this purely a matter > of taste, or are there serious traps lurking here? > Margins, depending on how you set them up can be hard margins and can clip off content. What you need to do is setup guides which is what I think you are looking for.
> 2. Colour management implementation. Our colour usage is > simplistic, and it would certainly be desirable (thought not > absolutely necessary) to send PDF/X-3 to our printer. I've > installed from > debian.scribus.net the packages scribus-cvs_1.3.0-1_i386.deb and > scribus-icc_0.1-1_all.deb, but it still is very unclear to me how > to set up colour management. Is it realistic to create a document > without CMS, and then apply CMS so as to have PDF/X-3 output? Does > using CMS put much extra strain on the software, in terms of file > sizes and so on? > First and foremost, make sure your printer can truly handle RGB and CMYK PDF/X-3. Scribus can generate fully compliant files, but unless your printer is prepared to support it, don't bother. Then, read *all* the docs and external linked howtos on color management if you have not used CMS before. Incorrect usage can make color issues worse. Color management is a complex affair. See http://docs.scribus.net > 3. Tables. I have lots of tables in which each row is just a > single line of text entries. The Scribus table support is not > intuitively obvious to me, and I wish there were a mini-howto > explaining all about it. How do you format text so that it will be > read into different array entries instead of the first box? What > happens if the desired table goes beyond a single page? The table > elements seem to be text boxes, so what happens if you want > graphics? > Tables support is very basic and it is planned to do a complete overhaul in the 1.3.x devel series. I am writing a howto right now for table handling options. > 4. Getting at a PageMaker file. Even though I have not used > PageMaker, a mini-howto on migrating from PageMaker to Scribus > would be very helpful to me in knowing what to ask from my > predecessor. What software exists that can read a PageMaker file -- > for example, is there a gratis demo vesion or anything? > Pagemaker and (sometimes) Indesign 2.0+ can read them. See here: http://www.scribus.org.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=FAQ&file=index&myfaq=yes&id_cat=3#19 > 5. Standardized items. Let's see if I have this right. The > scrapbook is for saving content. The styles are used within the > story editor for local text formatting, and it seems to be a matter > of taste whether to use the story editor or something else such as > the OpenOffice word processor -- like in programming with an > integrated development environment, where using an external editor > is reasonable. Templates are for the structure of a single page or > a whole document. So I left confused about how to store the > structure of just part of a page. For example, if I develop some > table format that I would like to reuse, what should I do? You can save scrapbooks or as a separate page which can be saved and then imported. I recommend creating a seprate layer and then importing into that, to avoid contents being disturbed on the page. I hope that helps, Peter -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/attachments/20050831/3e15519b/attachment.pgp
