A Linux Newspaper in This First Installment of a Three- Part Series, Former Newspaper Art Director Jason Walsh Looks at Pub- Lishing in Linux

Linux for Layout: Scribus KNOW HOW

Linux Layout with Scribus A Linux Newspaper In this first installment of a three- part series, former newspaper art director Jason Walsh looks at publishing in Linux. Jason will create a dummy newspaper using Scribus and other Linux applications, and have it tested in a real-world press situation.

BY JASON WALSH

he key to the increasing industrial “Hello World” of Linux desktop publish- are already familiar with from using penetration of Linux thus-far has ing. Photoshop and Illustrator. Neither Quark Tnot been in the taking over of gen- nor InDesign is available for Linux, nor eralized desktop computer usage; A brief History of Publishing are they likely to be any time soon. instead it has been by systematically Prior to the development of WYSIWYG attacking niche areas of computing, desktop publishing systems, the produc- Introducing Scribus notably web serving, scientific com- tion of newspapers and magazines was a All is not lost however. In typical open- puting, and code development. It is complicated and arcane process involv- source fashion, when an application was indisputable that this has been a major ing specialist equipment such as linotype not available, a group of developers got success – Linux now effectively owns machines, process cameras, and bromide together to produce a free alternative. several key areas of computing. prints. The graphical user interface of That alternative is Scribus (see Figure 1). One area where Linux has not been the Apple Macintosh and its original Installing Scribus is reasonably making major inroads is publishing, an killer app, Pagemaker, changed that for- straightforward – unfortunately, no uni- industry that remains the almost exclu- ever. Finally layout was accessible to versally compatible binary packages are sive preserve of the Apple Macintosh. anyone, at least anyone who could afford available, but compiling is a simple After years of directing potential users to a Mac and a copy of Pagemaker. enough matter: complex and unwieldy applications such Pagemaker’s dominance has long since as LayTeX, Linux finally has some excel- dwindled to the point where it is a fringe ./configure lent WYSIWYG desktop publishing tools. product used largely by businesses to put make In this series. we will produce four together newsletters. The major applica- make install dummy newspaper pages under Linux tion in the professional publishing world and have them appraised by David is Quark XPress In the late-1990s a seri- Then configure. Alternatively, RPMs Hunter at the pre-press department of ous challenger to Quark’s dominance are available for RedHat systems, while the Belfast News Letter, the world’s arrived from the Adobe stable: InDesign. Gentoo and Debian are also supported. oldest continuously published daily Eng- InDesign offers most of the features of lish-language newspaper. Quark Xpress, as well as many new fea- Page Maker Programmers amongst you may wish tures not found in Quark, all with the For our project we are working with spe- to think of this mini-publication as the Adobe user interface, which designers cific, predefined requirements. The end

www.linux-magazine.com December 2004 53 KNOW HOW Linux for Layout: Scribus

result will be a number Within this central rectangle, of pages from a tabloid we will later define our main lay- newspaper. The first step out of five columns of text. is to define the shape and Scribus handles columns in a size of your page, along slightly different manner from with some common para- other DTP apps – more on that meters: margins and later – but the design is efficient columns. and very usable. Figure 2 shows the Lay- The New Document dialog has out Properties dialog in a few other options: Automatic Quark XPress 6 on Mac text frames fills the printable area OS X. (Layout > Layout with a text frame on every newly Properties). If you are con- created page, handy for long doc- verting to Scribus from ument creation such as book Quark, step one is to copy design, but not relevant here. down this basic data and The remaining options are enter it into Scribus. If related to imposition. Make sure you are creating a new Figure 1: Scribus running on Suse 9.1. Finally, professional-quality desktop you check the Facing Pages layout, define equivalent publishing comes to Linux. option, which calls for a layout in layout properties as two-page spreads. required. page and whether it will be left of right When the pages are printed, they are Why not simply import the original facing. in pairs. The front and back pages are Quark template into Scribus? Unfortu- Our project is 297mm x 386mm; together and are folded in the middle nately, Scribus cannot import files from slightly squatter than most tabloids and and wrapped around the next set and so other layout applications. As the devel- roughly analogous with the size of the on. A complete newspaper is produced opers themselves say, “DTP file formats British Independent newspaper. This from several files with varying number are very complex internally – probably means we enter the page width as of pages, rather than from a single file the most complex on a PC. Creating 297mm and height as 386mm. containing the entire newspaper. This import/export filters is a task far more Printing right to the edge of the page design allows different pages to be pro- complex than importing a spreadsheet or (called full-bleed in the industry) is com- duced at different times (and by different simpler word processing file formats.” mon in magazines, but rare in persons), and it stops the Scribus files This is an impediment, but it is not an newspapers as the presses are generally from becoming unmanageably large. uncommon problem. Adobe InDesign not capable of it. Even when it is possi- can open files from Quark 4 but not ble, it is never called for on the front Frame Based Layout Quark 5 or 6. Quark cannot open any page. We need to define a printable area, Some open-source commentators have InDesign files whatsoever, nor can Quark and we do this by setting margin guides complained about the Scribus interface, Version 6 “save down” to Version 4. in the New Document dialog. These criticizing it as not suitable for the home Showing a degree of forward thinking properties are defined by the press and user. (This is a strange criticism of a and openness that neither Quark nor differ from newspaper to newspaper. In piece of software aimed at the profes- Adobe display, Scribus uses XML stan- our case, the margins are set up as: Top, sional user.) Both Quark XPress and dards for its native file format, meaning 29mm; Bottom, 16mm; Inside 8mm; Adobe InDesign doubtlessly seem that it may be possible to open Scribus Outside 23mm. files in other layout applications in the The margins are set un- future. evenly in order to create a “Tabloid” in US-terms generally refers rectangular box of 265mm x to a specific page size of 279.4mm x 340mm-this is the minimum 431.8mm. In Europe, tabloid is a more printable area on each page- general term referring to a roughly A3 in the correct position. newspaper page size, half the size of a On some pages, items can broadsheet produced on the same press. be outside this central rectan- The New Document dialog in Scribus gle; on others it would result is where the basic page is initially cre- in items not being printed. ated (see Figure 3). The page that we are This is an issue of pagination creating will serve as a template for all and page imposition that is, subsequent front pages (and in fact, for again, set by the newspaper all other pages, albeit in a slightly modi- press rather than the fied form). Our templates are very basic, designer, so we shall not be Figure 2:The Layout Properties menu in Quark XPress display- simply defining the size and shape of the dealing with it in detail here. ing the page defaults for the East Belfast Observer.

54 December 2004 www.linux-magazine.com Linux for Layout: Scribus KNOW HOW

at the press. There solution in the form of LittleCMS. Home are too many users may not need to install LittleCMS, variables to be but for professional output it is a must. absolutely confi- LittleCMS includes standard ICC color dent, and many of profiles and thus with LittleCMS them cannot be installed, PDF files produced in Scribus controlled from will be printed just as they appear on the desktop. The screen. Without it you’ll be guessing grade and type of how any given color will come out in paper used, the print. quality and viscos- It’s important to note that LittleCMS is Figure 3:The New Document dialog in Scribus. In this dialog the basic format ity of ink, the type not an application in its own right, rather of the page is defined. Here we have used the EBO settings taken from the and age of the it is a programmers’ library that can be original Quark file. press, and the skill used in application development – of the printers will Scribus is one of the applications that counter-intuitive to amateurs, but pub- all have a massive effect on the final makes use of it. If you install it before lishing is a complex business – this is not output. installing Scribus, Scribus will automa- word processing. One of the areas that is hardest to get tically use it. A greater problem facing Scribus is the right is reproduction of color, and Sadly, in Linux, the only mainstream fact that a stable, universally compatible although all of the issues listed above bitmap image editor that supports color binary is not available. Expecting design- will have an impact, it is important to management is Corel Photopaint. Hope- ers and journalists to compile software ensure that before you send files to press fully the availability of LittleCMS will from source is ridiculous and will be a that they are of as high a quality as encourage GIMP developers to get on serious impediment to Scribus’ potential possible. board sooner rather than later. adoption in the industry. Believe it or Color is a surprisingly complex sub- The most important aspect of using a not, there are hundreds of publications ject. Built-in color management was one color management system is remember- without IT departments; with a Mac- of the major advantages enjoyed by the ing to activate it! When it comes to based system they simply don’t need Macintosh as a print production platform exporting our final PDFs, we’ll go over in-house IT support. – and one of Linux’s major disadvan- this in detail, but for now have a look at The principal objection to Scribus tages. Until now. File>Export>Save Page as PDF. In the seems to be in its use of a dual modality: Color management is a technology dialog box that appears, choose the color layout is frame based; that is, every used to calibrate the color of input tab. If you have LittleCMS installed, you object is contained within a frame and devices, display devices, and output will see a drop-down menu under PDF/ can be manipulated in two ways – as an devices. The key principle is that of the X-3. This menu contains the press pro- object, or as content. “working space.” This is a color refer- files – consult your printer and choose This method of working is common to ence that is not tied to any specific the relevant one. both Quark and InDesign and is in fact a device, commonly “sRGB”, a basic addi- In the case of this dummy, the correct very efficient way of separating design tive color profile suitable for most profile is Euroscale Uncoated v2. This is from content. Furthermore, it is essential monitors. The problem with this is that beause Euroscale is an attempt to pro- for Scribus to offer a comfortable environ- the output device, be it the monitor or a ment to print professionals, be they printer, must make a transformation Scribus in use designers, journalists or sub-editors, if it is from sRGB to its native color space and Despite Quark’s dominance in the publish- to make serious inroads into publishing. the quality of this transformation will be ing industry some newspapers are moving Once you become accustomed to it, dictated by the quality of the device dri- to other solutions.The now defunct Dublin this manner of working is quite produc- ver. Daily used Adobe InDesign,as does Dublin’s tive: to place text on the page, you must A better method is the use of an Inter- Lucan Gazette and the Condé Nast maga- create a text frame first, and then insert, national Color Consortium compatible zine,Cosmo Girl. or type, text into this frame. In order to color management system. The ICC Until recently no publications were known place an image on the page, you create defined an open standard for Color to be using Scribus,however that has begun an image frame and then import the Matching Modules, preferably defined at to change.The Twin Tier Times,a small photo or graphic into this frame. The OS level, and color profiles both for the weekly newspaper distributed in southern frames and the content that they contain devices and the working space. New York state and northern Pennsylvania can then be manipulated independently. Color management technology can be has developed a workflow that not only implemented in the operating system, in incorporates Scribus,but is actually centered on it,using no other layout application. Color Management the API, or directly in an application. For According to the Scribus team, two other Printing is as much of an art as a science, years now, Mac OS has included Apple’s newspapers are using Scribus for day-to-day and it is perfectly possible to know own color management software, Color- production. everything about it and still face disaster Sync. Now Linux has a compatible

www.linux-magazine.com December 2004 55 KNOW HOW Linux for Layout: Scribus

Output Before the RIP stage,we will be exporting our pages as PDF files. Adobe’s PDF has become the standard format for exchanging print documents; if your PDF is properly created,it will print correctly on a wide range of output devices,including inkjet printers,dig- ital presses,and four-color offset press. Figure 4:The East Belfast Observer’s nameplate. vide a generic press profile for Europe. the positive areas; next, a drum covered CMYK press, it is therefore vital to North American and Japanese options with rubber is rolled over the plate, appropriately map the RGB colors seen are also available, Web/SWOP and Japan squeezing away the water and picking on-screen to colors that are printable in Color respectively, so if you live in Amer- up the ink. This drum is then rolled over the CMYK gamut. ica or Japan, choosing the relevant paper, transferring the ink onto the Moreover, if you send RGB files profile will result in improved results. paper. through the RIP, it will Uncoated refers to the paper type; many Color is printed by sepa- not recognize them as magazines are printed on expensive rating the colors into four color images and will coated paper, though newspapers are single plates, one for each print them as a single not. color used in the printing film. The end result will In order to know why color manage- process. This process is be particularly murky ment is essential, it is necessary to called color separation. In greyscale images. understand the basic principles of offset order for this process to Using CMYK colors printing, as it differs significantly from work correctly, color ele- means you won’t inkjet printing. ments such as photographs accidentally end up with Offset printing, or lithography, is the or graphics must be in the a monochrome page; process by which newspapers are CMYK colorspace. Screen using color management printed. Files are passed through a RIP, images on a computer are means that the colors or Raster Image Processor, which con- usually in RGB format, Red, you see in your proofs verts the layout into a PostScript image. Green and Blue. These are will be just like the end Each page becomes a single image, the additive primary colors result. which is then output to film and trans- used to form secondary and ferred onto an aluminum plate. tertiary colors with light. Page Elements This plate is fixed to a drum and rolled With ink, it is necessary to Figure 6:The Scribus Proper- Pages consist of three through water, which adheres to the neg- use the subtractive pri- ties dialog, where you can basic elements: text, ative areas of the image. Then the plate maries, Red, Yellow and adjust almost any aspect of graphics, and white is rolled through ink, which adheres to Blue. In printing, these are an object. space. The ratio of each substituted with will depend on what you Magenta, Yellow and Cyan, are designing; advertisements differ sig- which offers a wider range of nificantly from editorial content, and printable colors. The order in editorial pages will differ from publica- which the colors are printed tion to publication and even within is Cyan first, then Magenta, publications. and then Yellow – CMY. The With some notable exceptions, such as “K” stands for Key, which is France’s Libération and the UK’s the registration color, Black. Guardian, newspaper design is unin- Without the final black plate, spired. That is not to say that the result would be that newspapers are necessarily badly “black” elements such as designed, just that the criteria are differ- type, would be dark brown, ent from other areas of graphic design. purple, or green. The two key aspects of newspaper If you print an RGB file on design are: ease of reading and ease of an inkjet printer, some of the layout. The former is important because colors will be “out of gamut,” a newspaper must be digested quickly by Figure 5: After exporting the nameplate from the drawing pro- that is, outside of the range of a general readership, rather than a spe- gram – in our case Inkscape – open it in GIMP and change it printable colors. An annoy- cialist one. Being consistent and into a 1-bit image by selecting Image>Mode>Indexed and ance, but not a disaster. conforming to certain basic rules will choosing a 1-bit Palette with no dithering. If you are outputting to a make the task of reading easier. The lat-

56 December 2004 www.linux-magazine.com Linux for Layout: Scribus KNOW HOW

ter aspect is important because, unlike After selecting the appropriate file, select styles, such as boldface, italics and so on, magazines, which generally have a Tools>Properties to reach the Scribus along with the text. monthly turnaround, newspapers tend to Properties dialog (See Figure 6) and We’ll be discussing how to work with be daily and there is significantly select Image. Select the Scale to Frame text in detail next month, but for now increased pressure on the layout team. Size option, making sure that the propor- let’s just concentrate on getting some For our dummy newspaper, the first ele- tional button is checked. The nameplate text into the layout. ment is the nameplate (see Figure 4). should now be the width of the newspa- Getting the text in is a simple business: Often mistakenly referred to as the mast- per front page, excluding the margins. select the Insert Text Frame button from head, the nameplate is the name of the Above the nameplate are three boxes, the Scribus toolbar and draw a frame on newspaper at the top of the front page. In which highlight content inside the news- the page, roughly where you want the this case, the typefaces used are Gill Sans paper. These boxes are empty image text to go. Next, select File>Import>Get Light Italic and Gill Sans Bold Condensed. frames that have been colored using the Text. The text from the chosen file will For this dummy newspaper, our name- Tools>Properties>Colors dialog. Directly flow into the selected frame. plate is a high resolution TIFF file that below the nameplate are the date and To edit the text, select Edit Contents of was created in Inkscape, exported, and issue number of the newspaper and its Frame from the toolbar and use the I- then converted into a 1-bit TIFF at a res- price. Both are created as text elements beam cursor to select the text as you olution of 600 dots per inch (see Figure in Scribus in the normal manner. It is would in any ordinary word processor. 5). 600dpi is an incredibly high resolu- also possible to create the nameplate as a Alternatively, you can use the Story Edi- tion, especially when you consider that normal text frame within Scribus, but as tor (also on the toolbar) to edit the text. the press we shall be using prints at it is an unchanging element, it is better around 180dpi, so why bother with such to use a graphic file, lest a typo should Conclusion a massive resolution? creep in over time. This article introduced you to Scribus, a Files that use a 1-bit colorspace are The next element to include is text. In professional-quality Open Source layout black and white; not greyscale, but liter- terms of text entry, it is inefficient to type application for Linux. In next month’s ally black and white. Generally speaking, directly into Scribus. Even if you have a issue, you’ll learn more about managing 1-bit TIFFs are used for line art. The huge monitor, you’ll spend a lot of time text and graphics in the Scrubus environ- advantage in using a 1-bit colorspace is zooming in and out to read parts of the ment. ■ that the color of the lines (or in our case pages. Instead, prepare all text you wish type) can be changed within the page to add to the file in a word processor like Jason Walsh was the layout application, so a single source file OpenOffice Writer, spell-check it, and art director on the East Belfast Observer can be used for multiple variations of the then import it into Scribus. from launch in Janu- same image. The downside of 1-bit At this point, you must save the text as ary 2004,until July images is that they degrade at low reso- plain text before importing it into Scribus. 2004,prior to which HOR lutions – even at 300dpi a 1-bit image Scribus cannot import any form of styled T he was the art director for the Irish glossy will begin to display ragged edges. text, be it Rich Text Format (RTF) or the magazines,Gorgeous and CityCraic. To import the nameplate, select Insert native OpenOffice file format. This lack of These days he works as a journalist and

Picture, the third icon in the toolbar, and support for formatted text may change THE AU has contributed to Linux Magazine, draw a frame the entire width of the soon – Scribus’ developers are working Variant, Mute, the Guardian and many printable area between the two margins. on RTF importing. Support for RTF would other newspapers and magazines on art, design and technology. Next, select File>Import>Get Picture. give the user the ability to import text

A Third, Fourth and Fifth-way Initial impressions may suggest that there publications such as community group curious is why Adobe doesn’t continue to are relatively few desktop publishing pack- and church newsletters,nevertheless,it is develop FrameMaker for Linux – a market ages on Linux,but that is not really the case. a professional quality application and is obsessed with technical documentation. Perhaps they’re buried under the mountain available not only for the Amiga and Linux, If you’re determined to use only open source of command-based typesetting software but Windows,Mac OS X, and on two some- software, two further options are Xclamation such as TeX and the traditional UNIX utility, what more exotic platforms:MorphOS and and Passepartout. Troff,and its GNU derivative Groff,but good Amiga PowerPC. Xclamation,developed by Axene is part GUI DTP tools do exist for Linux. In late 1999 Adobe released a beta-test ver- of the Axena office suite. Xclamation is a The main commercial application is sion of FrameMaker for Linux. Never really full-featured DTP app that uses the Motif PageStream. Developed by Grasshopper LLC popular on the Mac,FrameMaker is used for toolkit and as such,should run on virtually in the US,PageStream originated on the creating scientific and technical documents. any UNIX OS. Amiga back in the 1980s; the Apple Macin- Currently available only for Windows,Mac The final alternative is Passepartout.Where tosh’s strong-arm lock on the publishing and Solaris/SPARC,but signifying Adobe’s Scribus is a KDE application,Passepartout is a industry meant that it never gained currency intention to confine FrameMaker to the tech- native GNOME app,offering those who pre- in the professional arena. Instead nical publishing market,FrameMaker will no fer the GNOME GUI and toolkit a native PageStream found a niche making small longer be developed for the Mac OS.What is layout application.