Post AzTA0aY2QHMk4vgiw4 by davidrevoy@framapiaf.org
(DIR) More posts by davidrevoy@framapiaf.org
(DIR) Post #AzT9GypzmZNk5gL8Ii by JenJen@mastodon.art
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Anyone able to recommend a good/free open source alternative to Adobe's InDesign? It doesn't need all the functionalities. It just needs to be able to prep books for print properly. :artpeek:
(DIR) Post #AzT9Gzdco354ZbYleq by aaribaud@mastodon.art
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@JenJen Just in case: @davidrevoy, any direct or indirect experience with this?
(DIR) Post #AzT9H0FYX1QETFJ3mS by davidrevoy@framapiaf.org
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@aaribaud @JenJen Scribus is what I use for my books. The desktop publishing part is OK, the export for print part is full of bug and traps depending the PDF specification and color space ICC of the printer. In short, under certain printer setup, it can be heaven, and on other, it can be hell. I met both cases.I have a 'print' tag on my blog with logging my, issue, and sharing my workaround about it.
(DIR) Post #AzTA0aY2QHMk4vgiw4 by davidrevoy@framapiaf.org
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@aaribaud @JenJen my main tip with it: don't trust Scribus ability to convert images on the fly at export. It says it can but will bug depending the input ICC or image format. So feed Scribus with ready converted TIFF, in the correct CMYK/ICC of printer, and use recent PDF specification if your printer allows it for the final, because PDFx 1.x versions (some printer still use that) can't be done properly with Scribus. (A ghostscript command line I share on one of my article can fix this).
(DIR) Post #AzTB74lf4zA7UkiYfA by davidrevoy@framapiaf.org
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@aaribaud @JenJen https://www.davidrevoy.com/article757/the-english-book-printed-project-production-report-3 this article is my sort of 'post-mortem' blog post with all my failure, until the success (not representative of all Scribus journey, but of the worst case scenario: worst PDF spec, worst ICC, no communication with printer possible). As said, I also published many other things with Scribus with a full success and easy path, but it might help to read how I debugged the worst case scenario. Do not hesitate to ask me for help if you struggle with it.
(DIR) Post #AzTBzzyqa1tuZg4fRo by eishiya@mastodon.art
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@JenJen If you're putting together bigger books, watch out for Scribus's memory handling. If a book has too many large images, Scribus can run out of memory and freeze/crash. It seems to keep uncompressed image data in memory even when the pages are off-screen.I had to split my 276-page (B&W!) book into numerous separate files to avoid this issue.@davidrevoy I'm curious if you ran into this issue as well; I don't remember seeing mention of it in the posts about the similarly thick P&C books.
(DIR) Post #AzTC02xXVLdZoUUAKG by davidrevoy@framapiaf.org
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@eishiya Yes, I ran into this 'too big' PDF exported issue( a bug reported AFAIK) , and it was critical on my side because my printer had a custom form on their webpage, and the upload had a limit for the filesize... I found a way to post process it with ghostscript. It's somewhere on this blog post ( edit: part of the "test 1, big book 1" chapter, a 2,4GB PDF and 800MB upload limit 🫠) https://www.davidrevoy.com/article757/the-english-book-printed-project-production-report-3 . @JenJen
(DIR) Post #AzTEoB3rr5UfKSTf3A by eishiya@mastodon.art
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@davidrevoy This looks like a different issue, mine was with Scribus itself being unable to keep all my pages in memory at once, so I never even got as far as the PDF export on large books xP All my exports were under 30 pages because I had to split the book up, so I never ran into PDF file size issues.
(DIR) Post #AzTEoBdJjHql6P3yIy by davidrevoy@framapiaf.org
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@eishiya Outch! 😵💫 What a bad bug.