On 02/13/2017 07:52 PM, Dave Brzeski & Jilly Paddock wrote: > Having looked at the price of InDesign & reeled in shock, I looked for an > alternative. Scribus looks > great. I already use Apache OpenOffice, so I'm used to Open Source software. > > What I'm looking to learn to do is format books for ebook & paperback > editions. I don't really fancy > doing it on the CreateSpace website & I definitely don't fancy their charges > for doing it for you. > > I picked up a copy of the Scribus 1.3.5 Beginner's Guide by Cedric Geary and > was a little worried > when I read in the preface that Scribus was ideal for helping create business > card, brochures, > newsletters, magazines & catalogues, but books aren't mentioned. Is Scribus > up to the task of laying > out paperback books and are there any limitations I need to know about going > in? >
The comments already sent are generally pretty good advice. One place to look for examples of what people have done is in the Success Stories series on the wiki: https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Success_stories_2017 You will see a wide variety of books and other tasks people have managed over the years. Christoph Sch?fer and I also managed to get out the official Scribus manual in 2009, a 400-page book using Scribus for the layout. Christoph did the layout for the book. For ease of collaboration, we started out writing the manual on a wiki, after which he imported that to openoffice writer so that he could create and apply styles. These ODT files were then imported to Scribus for the final layout of the book, using version 1.3.3.12. The problem with trying to transform something in Scribus to an ebook is the very different nature of the two end-products. PDFs rather rigidly control the structure of a document and placement of objects, whereas in an ebook, such as epub or mobi, there is a flexibility that is built-in since what you see depends on the device you are viewing it on. In particular, images can be very problematic. There is certainly the possibility of viewing a PDF on a tablet or other device, though my experience is sometimes good, sometimes not so good as far as the comfort and ease of reading. As someone stated, Sigil is a very good tool for creating epubs, and you can use Calibre to transform an epub to mobi format. A little script I wrote recently, run from inside Scribus, would create a text file with a list of all the text and image frames in a document, with their respective page numbers. The image frames also include the filename for each image, so this could be a reference for making something in Sigil: https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Export_list_of_frames_and_page_numbers There is also another script that includes the text from the various frames: https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Export_all_text As far as text searchability, the only issue that might come from Scribus would be if the glyphs are outlined (turned into vectors), rather than embedded, and sometimes you may be compelled to outline. Recent versions of Scribus have image caching, which helps with the slowness of editing that was especially problematic in the past, causing people to break up their documents into smaller sub-documents, then joining the resulting PDFs together later. For a large book with a lot of images, you may still need to do this. Greg
