There is a margin of error, and that is what the bleed compensates for. As with all things mechanical, the cutters are not 100% accurate. Magazine pages (and flyers, and book pages) are printed on sheets larger than the final page itself. Margins fall within the page and bleeds fall outside the page.īleeds on the other hand fall outside the page. Margins frame the main content on the page, they are limits inside the page itself. You can also set the margins and bleeds for your standard page. While you’re at it, set the Default Unit to millimeters and set the page size to A4, which is pretty standard for a European publications. Today you’ll be building the underlying template for a magazine article, so pick Double Sided for the Document Layout. Once installed, to start the program look for Scribus in the Office section of your launcher, or just type “scribus” in your HUD. We’ll focus on the 1.4 branch for the time being.
However, be advised that this task is far from trivial and the end result may not be very stable or even work at all, so install 1.5 at your own risk. There are two branches: the stable 1.4.x branch will give you most of what you need, but if you’re looking for bleeding edge and more features, you can try compiling the snapshot from the 1.5.x branch. Scribus is available in the repositories of most GNU/Linux distros, as well as for MacOS X and Windows.
Today you’ll be learning how to use page templates, known in the trade as Master Pages. Secondly, if you do the preliminary legwork your workflow will improve… a lot!Īlthough we cannot stop people from using wordprocessors for layout (please don’t do this), we can show you how to use pre-layout to make your life easier. And you can do so much more with Scribus in the realm of layout than you can with, say, LibreOfficce Writer. However, firstly, as with all software, as the number of things you can achieve goes up, so does an application’s complexity.
So regardless whether you’re considering a career in graphic design now or for the future, knowledge of programs like Scribus will likely come in handy.Īdmittedly Scribus, and any other desktop publishing software for that matter, at first glance seem to make what should be simple, unnecessarily complicated. And, who knows? Maybe some day we may even have a medium much better than the crappy “solution” that is current HTML to lay out digital media, and we will still have a use for specific design applications. For starters, traditional layout is still finding a new life in all of places the web in all the those infographics everybody loves to make. Sure, one day all those dead tree publications will themselves die, but somehow I don’t believe the art of distributing text and images on a page in a pleasing manner, i.e. Along with the likes of Inkscape, GIMP/ Krita, Synfig and Blender 3D, it is part of a veritable open source Creative Suite.īelieve it or not, outside the techno-bubble you and I live in, there’s still plenty of room for print periodicals. Scribus is the free software community’s answer to Indesign, Adobe’s program for layout.