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? 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? 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? 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? 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? -- John
