Using Scribus

Google Summer of Code Slots

2009-04-10T08:06:00.004+03:00

This year Scribus got 8 applications for the GSoC. Today Leslie Hawthorn from Google released the preliminary slot allocation numbers. Looks like Scribus will get three students funded by Google.

It's now time to rate the applications. This doesn't mean that all other applications will be wasted. We will most likely have some extra resources to fund three more students to finish their ideas. Some of the funding will come from the Scribus book sales (still waiting for my book, doh).

I have agreed to mentor an odt import plugin project. I've done the odt text import plugin in Scribus and thus feel comfortable enough to mentor Anoop in his project. Should be an exiting spring and summer ahead. Not even mentioning autumn when we will get the t-shirts from Google.

A few other interesting projects and their slots:

OpenICC 3
Inkscape 6
Gimp 5

Two branches of Scribus

2009-04-05T01:10:00.006+03:00

It has been a while since my last post but finally I got an idea about an article to help people who are thinking about starting a layout job in Scribus. I will hopefully make it a bit easier to select the right version to download.

Stable Branch
There are two branches of Scribus. Version number 1.3.3.x is called the stable branch and is recommend for anybody with tight deadlines. Stable in Scribus world means that the version is tested and used enough for Scribus team to release it with adjective stable. No new features come into the stable branch only bugs will be fixed.

The most recent stable version released is 1.3.3.12. With the stable branch it is pretty safe to choose the version currently under development (1.3.3.13svn) since there will be only bug fixes in there. If you feel the version numbering is a bit odd just think about it as a lame joke. Without this numbering scheme it would have not been possible to release a version with a number 1.3.3.7.

Development Branch
The most fun in software development is implementation of new features. All new features in Scribus will first land into the development branch. The current development branch is the version 1.3.5svn. Svn in the version number indicates that it has not been released yet but is still under active development.

The last released development branch version is 1.3.4 which is totally outdated already. This is why you should prefer the svn version of 1.3.5. With the development branch things usually are a bit more unstable than one would expect but that is acceptable since the development branch is not meant to be used for production work. The idea behind development branch releases is to get the new features tested and fine tuned before turning the development branch into a new stable branch.

It is not guaranteed that a development branch will turn into a stable branch after a release. Currently the next development branch release will be 1.3.5 but it is still possible that the version after it, 1.3.6, will also be a development release where some more new features will come into play and 1.3.5 features will be optimized.

What's there more in the development branch?

Character Styles
Better Shaped Paragraphs*
Some other nice features
QT4
Crashes (probably)
A wish that people will use the latest version from svn trunk and report about their problems after checking the bug tracker at http://bugs.scribus.net

* Scribus can finally create nicely shaped paragraphs without huge white paths. With the current stable version shaping the paragraph perfectly needed a lot of manual tweaking. With the 1.3.5svn there are optical margins, glyph extensions and word tracking there to help achieving the perfect shape more easily.

The left paragraph in the picture below has been created with the settings from the stable branch. On the right automatic help has been turned on with the 1.3.5svn version.

Optical margins help aligning the right and left sides of a paragraph into a perfect line hanging the small glyphs at the end of the lines (on the left).

So which one should I choose?

With a work to do you should probably go with the stable branch. With the development branch you may hit issues that may delay the work seriously. If however you do not care about deadlines or are free of them 1.3.5svn will be a great way to participate in Scribus development. More eyes we get for the bug hunting better product we will get and if you are a developer remember to submit patches with your bug reports.

Thank a Dev Day

2009-03-07T10:55:00.002+02:00

Send email to the developer(s) of your favorite Free Software applications on March 27th and tell them how you use the software and how much you appreciate the hard work they do.

Read More…

In Scribus devs with their addresses can be found at:

Help→About Scribus→Authors

Preparing a document for printer: CMYK PDF

2009-02-28T20:37:00.000+02:00

In the Preparing a document for printer series I will cover the most asked questions regarding Scribus generated pdf files and printers. However these are only generic instructions and one should always discuss about the job in question with the printer.

The most important thing to understand is that everything you see on screen is defined in rgb color space and most often printer works in a different color space called cmyk. This means there must be a conversion done from rgb to cmyk to get things look ok when printed.

For a succesful conversion one needs to find out the cmyk icc profile to use. This can only be done after the print house has been chosen because not all printers are set up to use the same icc profile. You will find the cmyk profile (aka target/printer profile) from your printer's documentation or by asking them.

Next thing to do is to make the icc profile appear in Scribus. You can use the standard location of color profiles on your platform or can set up your own custom directory in Scribus' preferences. Copy the icc profile in one of these locations and restart Scribus.

Open your document to be sent to the printer and go to File→Document Setup→Color management. It's important to know that in Scribus Document Setup is for currently open document and Preferences only affect all future documents.

In Color Management page enable CM and set up profiles. If you use Gimp for your images it will be safe to choose srgb for images. Adobe Photoshop embeds a profile into the image and Scribus will use the embedded profile over the one set in Document Setup/Preferences. As the printer profile select the cmyk icc profile provided by your printer. Once done with the CM settings click ok to close the window.

Last thing to do is to export your work to a pdf. Open up the pdf export window from File→Export→Save As PDF... To make a cmyk pdf you will need to select Printer target on the color page. Do not check any of those check boxes on the color page. Other important things to do at the export phase is to embed all fonts and choose the right pdf version. For most cases pdf version 1.3 is the one to use.

Last thing to do to make sure colors will come out ok is to include a color proof in the contract done with the printer. This means that printer will send you a proof to be approved before starting the actual print job.

If the work is going to be printed with a home printer rgb pdf will most likely provide the best quality. For rgb pdf it will be enough to select Screen/Web as your target in the pdf export window.

Cannot embed a font into a pdf document

2009-02-23T16:04:00.005+02:00

Recently I was asked what to do if a font cannot be embedded into a pdf file with Scribus. Instead of embedding Scribus was forcing all texts using the font to vectors. This meant that all hinting information was lost too and pdf looked bad on screen ('l' glyphs became bold, see image at the top right corner). It's good to know that a print job won't be affected by this.

First it'll be good to check the font type in question. Opentype embedding is only available in recent version of pdf standard which Scribus doesn't yet support. Printers also often request pdf version 1.3 where there is no embedding available for Opentype fonts. If the font is Opentype font changing it to Type1 or Truetype font may solve the issue.

If the problem was not with the font type then one should close all the documents open in Scribus and open up preferences. On the fonts page there is a list of all fonts Scribus found. One column on the list is reserved for subsetting which in Scribus case really means outlining. Make sure that the font with the problem does not have check mark on the subset column. If it is checked remove the check mark and retry pdf export. Remember to reclick on the Embed all fonts button in the pdf export window.

If embedding still doesn't work there's not much to do but find a new font for the texts using the problematic font.

PS. Feeds are working again.

Still no feeds

2009-02-05T22:18:00.003+02:00

I recently migrated my Feedburner account over to Google because of their request. Now my feeds have been down for three weeks and nothing seems to happen. I wonder what's taking this long. At the moment I don't feel like blogging. Well there aren't any readers anyway.

Still no luck with Feedburner

2009-01-22T00:47:00.004+02:00

Migrating my Feedburner feeds to the Google account has been a real disaster. It took five days from Google to move all the feeds and even now the custom domain option called MyBrand is not working.

Looks like Google left MyBrand activated at the old feedburner.com account and now at my new Google account MyBrand is checking the status of my domain feeds.tsoots.fi from the old account. Because it is taken I cannot use the domain feeds.tsoots.fi with my Google Feedburner account. This means that my subscribers will not get anything from the site.

It is also impossible to reach any support person at Google. There just does not seem to be any support available. There is some hc user at Google Feedburner discussion grop and that is it. Not even him has confirmed my MyBrand issue.

Due to all these problems I have no subscribers left. I did have 30 or so subscribers. The amount has now decreased to 5. Look at the sad picture below. Google please help me and sort out the MyBrand issue. Thanks

Problems with Feedburner

2009-01-17T01:42:00.004+02:00

Google told me I had approximately 2 months time to move my feeds from feedburner.com to feedburner.google.com. I used a link on the Adsense page to move my Feedburner feeds to Google account. After Google did their magic I got an email telling me everything should be ok. My 14 feeds were succesfully transferred.

Problems with feeds not showing up
I logged in at http://feedburner.google.com and what did I get. Only one of my feeds shows up there. There are still 13 feeds missing and I am not able to log in back to my Feedburner.com account to manage these.

Problems with Mybrand
Part of the transfer process was to update the CNAME for my own feeds domain. I also did this and now all my feeds are giving 404 and my own custom feed does not appear on the Mybrand page of feedburner.google.com. If I try to add it there I get an error message telling me 'The domain "feeds.tsoots.fi" you specified is already in use.'.

Feeds in question are
They should all work also at my custom domain feeds.tsoots.fi but that's giving a 404 at the moment. The only feed showing up at feedburner.google.com is 'Hiiop - blogi'.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/usingscribus (Using Scribus)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/atrym (Tsoots rates and reviews)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/kuvat (Tsootsin kuvat)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/elama (Tsootsin elämä)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tsflickr (tsflickr)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/rsstwitter (Twitter / Tsoots)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tsootsfm (Tsoots at Fontmatrix)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tsootsnp (Tsootsin kuuntelemaa)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tsdelicious (tsdelicious)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/jutut (Jutut)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TsootsAtDelicious (Tsoots at Delicious)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Hiiop (Hiiop - blogi)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tsoots (Hiiop - vs)
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/kirjani (Tsootsin kirjat)

I would appreciate any help on this matter.

Sivari & Totaali Chose Free Software

2009-01-14T20:30:00.005+02:00

Sivari & Totaali (later S&T) – AKL’s quarterly magazine – has now been done entirely with free software for a year. Simo Hellsten tells that it was a totally new situation. With the first issue of 2008 there was only an empty hard drive, Linux installation cd and a laptop.

It has not been only about free software but free fonts and artwork has been used in the magazine as well. Applications chosen were Scribus for the layout, Gimp with Separate+ and Inkscape for images and OpenOffice.org for texts. Free fonts used in the magazine are Bitstream Charter and DejaVu Sans. Some of the images on the magazine are from web services where it is possible to search images by their license. This allows S&T use Creative Commons licensed images in the magazine. To name a few image galleries where such search options exist S&T lists Flickr, Wikimedia Commons and Google Picasa Web.

In the second issue of 2008 Simo Hellsten shares his thoughts on free software and how it was possible to set up the first issue with them. A few problems arose but there was no need to switch applications because workarounds were easily found. Simo Hellsten gathers it together:

Linux and print design is often thought to fall apart because there is no support for color separations in Linux. Now – with my experience – I can tell that color separations are really doable without any major problems.

Issue 3/2008 can be read online (pdf document, 2.45MB, in Finnish)

Reference (in Finnish)
http://akl-web.fi/sivari_totaali/n_tehtiin_sivari_totaali_osa_1_tabula_rasa
http://akl-web.fi/files/st_1-2008.pdf, st_2-2008.pdf, st_3-2008.pdf

Blogging in English

2009-01-13T20:27:00.007+02:00

Some time ago I started to blog in Finnish. I have been mainly writing about Scribus and other free graphic applications. It has not been a huge success but I do have some 20 readers with my Finnish blog. To broaden up the audience I have now decided to start blogging in English too.

I can hear you asking why not in the official Scribus blog. Well, there are a few reasons. I am not confident enough with my English and the official blog has way too large audience for me and my stories. I am feeling shy.

I will be blogging about Scribus usage and I hope my blog will offer some help to those only starting with Scribus. Occasionally I will be also blogging about random events happening in my small world but do not worry that will not happen often. I will be on topic most of the time.

Enjoy and share your comments, suggestions and ideas for blog articles at the community page. There it is also possible to submit questions you may have about Scribus. Remember to add yourself to the Using Scribus member widget if you have a Google/Yahoo/AOL/OpenID account.

Album Reviews, Part 1

2009-01-11T12:14:00.001+02:00

I have recently started adding reviews and ratings to my Rateyourmusic.com page.Somehow I have a feeling they will be buried in there. This gave me an idea to republish reviews here in my Juttuja blog. I will be submitting reviews whenever there are five or so reviews done.

I have absolutely no music taste and I'm heavily affected by friends and critics but still I try to be honest to my personal feelings. Here are the first few short album reviews and ratings. Album arts are showed from Rateyourmusic.com.

								The Allman Brothers Band - Idlewild South (1970)
Where is the catch? My description for the album Idlewild South would be easy going and static. It may force you to fall asleep.
								Albert Ayler - Spiritual Unity (1964)
Cannot say I know much about music or jazz and even less about free jazz but I have made a decision to broaden up the music field I am listening. Here are my thoughts on the album Spiritual Unity. Throughout the album I had a feeling that Albert Ayler was in great pain only relieved during the few melodic parts of the two versions of Ghost. Somehow I felt also relieved myself during these parts only to be annoyed by not recognizing the original song behind the melody. In my rating I am heavily affected by the other reviewers and lists but I will get back to Ayler once I have had larger share of free jazz.
								Band of Horses - Cease to Begin (2007)
This one sounds like Coldplay gone wrong. Although there are more colors in there than with any Coldplay album.
								Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends (2008)
Boohoo, cry me a river. Viva la Vida... is easily the most boring album from Coldplay. One could think it is about praising the joys of life but instead of praising Chris Martin is crying and rolling in the melancholy of album's sound. I will rather eat porridge every morning till the end of my life than listen to this album through again. Church bells fgs!
								MGMT - Oracular Spectacular (2008)
I am a bit scared if this is where our future lies.
								M.A. Numminen - På svenska (1972)
Dägä dägä makes it all worth it: Ihmiselle kaiken tärkein maailmassa on dägä Näläntunne katoaa kun dägä dägä soi dägä Tuska häviää kun aina kuulen rokin äänen dägä dägä Ystävän jos tahdot saada, lähesty ja sano dägä Vihollinen isänmaassa hyppää esiin ja huutaa dägä dägä Rokin isku kulmat ratkoo dägä soi dägä dägä – M.A. Numminen
								Portishead - Third (2008)
Boring music does not become interesting with propeller sounds.
								Paul Simon - There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973)
Kodachrome is one of my all time favorite songs. Unfortunately it will not alone carry this album to the four stars.