Over the last few months, the OSP and Mute team have established a new design and production workflow for Mute magazine, using Open Source tools. Below are a few of the questions we are encountering during the last stages of this process.
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Mute 2 6 – Questions and answers
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Storing images, should they always be kept in the same place, at present
we've made a folder for each Scribus document and then I sit an images
sub directory, this way I can move the whole set of files around without
risking losing images?
Good idea; yes this procedure is necessary (just like old versions of QuarkXpress).
Fonts between OS WinXP/OSX/Linux are not being recognised in ODT or SLA. Linux if OK but WinXP and OSX (check version numbers of Scribus) have problems. Could this be a font TTF issue?
What do you mean 'between'? And what are the problems exactly? (hard to test / recognize the problems for us because we do not have a Windows machine available)
On the biographies, black boxes and the title boxes, how should we bring in the pointed angled graphics into the document?
Re-make your basic shape in Inkscape, save as SVG and import into Scribus (File -> Import -> Import SVG). SVG's can be altered in Scribus.
How do we export text and second how to we make PDFs text machine readable?
We wished we had thought of this beforehand... ~~Scribus automatically outlines *all* .ttf fonts to outlines, i.e. renders them machine un-readable (Subscription pages etc. have already been converted to outlines btw. so there we don't have any choice).~~*
For the next issue, we will need to choose our fonts based on this, but testing is needed because Type1 fonts with problems (a missing glyph for example) might end up as outlines as well.
Even if the font was *not* converted to outlines, the exported PDF's still need to undergo some treatment, but that in itself is easy to do with the help of our friends pdftops and ps2pdf.
(read this thread)Another option, is to extract text from the .sla; which seems a bit archaic ... although interesting with respect to web-to-print.
* Update: apparently the problem was in the fontfile itself. After using another version, the problem dissappeared.
How do we output with and without Crop Marks?
Save as PDF > check: Clip to page margins (= without cropmarks)
Save as PDF > uncheck: Clip to page margins (= with cropmarks)
How do we join PDF pages together for the book block?
Use pdftk (command line tool):
$ pdftk inputA.pdf inputBpdf output combined.pdfEXAMPLE:
f
snelting@station:~/Desktop/articles$ pdftk '/home/fsnelting/Desktop/articles/0005.pdf' '/home/fsnelting/Desktop/articles/0004.pdf' '/home/fsnelting/Desktop/articles/0003.pdf' '/home/fsnelting/Desktop/articles/0002.pdf' '/home/fsnelting/Desktop/articles/0001.pdf' output combined.pdfMore ideas/ways of using pdftk: http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/, or see pdftk manual - you can take specific pages from certain documents, re-arrange order etc. etc.
How can we later replace specific pages?
Repeat the above recipe with the new pages instead (you simply re-create the whole package).
How to crop an area from the cover and add it as a page to the book block PDF file?
Ehm... how would you do this otherwise? Our guess: Edit -> Document setup -> change to final cover size; make sure to check 'apply size setting to all pages'. Than re-position artwork, and export as pdf. Add to pdftk ingredients (see above) and merge with other pages.
How do we check and apply leading to the SLA files?
Leading can be applied through styles or in the Properties box (Windows -> Properties -> Texttab), but surprisingly not in the text editor. The properties box is a bit tricky to handle because you will never be sure whether the displayed leading applies to a single frame or to multiple frames, and when you re-apply a leading here, it will overrule the leading applied in styles. Best is to trust styles + check visually with view -> view baseline grid.
How do we update folios and page numbers?
On each article: Document setup -> Sections -> change start number.