Making a photobook with Scribus

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If you’d like to make a suggestion, please comment below! The more specific and the more actionable your request, the more the likelihood of it being included. :wink:

This will eventually work it’s way into being a tutorial. For now it is just notes.

remove magenta color script

Scribus wiki: tips on making a photo album

Image Wizard Advanced

making a photobook using a script

automatic image import not requiring tkinter

scale and align an image

High-level overview

  1. Choose book options: page size and number of pages, bleed, trim, margins, and gutter. Probably also an output color profile. Many of these parameters are supplied by your print vendor.
  2. Make some layouts. Store those layout in a Scribus Scrapbook, this will allow you to reuse layouts easily.
  3. Choose page layouts by applying the desired layout from a Scrapbook to a specific page.
  4. Import images. You can use a script if you have a lot of images (is this true?) or place them into the image frames by hand.
  5. Fine tune image position and caption.

To Do

  • Sorting the photos: Using darktable, what I really miss is doing sorted collection as preparations for photo books. Of course I can add all images that may be used in the project into one collection by adding a tag, but there is no possibility to bring them into an arrangement that reflects their order in the book. (from @chris)

    @paperdigits thoughts: Geeqie can apparently do this; need to look into it.

    @Tobias has offered a possible darktable implementation here. I’d be happy to include this in the steps, but I’m not aware of a good solution to do this currently, other than numbering the files on the file system. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.

  • Building reasonable page templates and working efficiently with them, especially with images and text. (from @chris)

    @paperdigits thoughts: Yes, see the comments about Scrapbooks above. Scribus can export Scrapbooks.

  • Aligning images into the template layout, especially if the box is fix and you want to shift your image around to see the best crop (as told before, this already improved a lot). (from @chris)

    @paperdigits thoughts: Yes, will cover in Fine tune images above.

  • Vertical text alignment. While this was implemented in scribus, I have no idea which version I have to install to get the feature, all that seem to be available precompiled for ubuntu seem to lack this feature. (from @chris)

    @paperdigits thoughts: Yes, will cover in Fine tune images above. Vertical text alignment seems to be added in the 1.5.x development build.

  • Export: How to maintain the book for print including bleed and have an PDF export without bleed? (from @chris)

    @paperdigits thoughts: See File > Export (as PDF) > Pre-Press > Bleed Settings. Here you can see the Bleed to 0 if you want to export a PDF with no Bleed, such as for posting to the web or for consumption that doesn’t require any sort of printer’s mark.

  • Double-side spreads: In principle, these are simple in scribus, but for “lay-flat” photo books with, e.g., saal (a German supplier) an odd number of horizontal pixels is required if you want to upload image files instead of the PDF. That was driving me crazy (not a particular problem, but probably there’s a solution out there). (from @chris)

    @paperdigits thoughts: This is usually pretty printer-specific, since you’ll need some of the image in the bleed (and you’ll have to be OK with loosing a bit of the image to the binding and such. I’m tempted to shy away from it for now because of the necessary specifics and the low margin for error to get something good looking.

  • Not being a designer, I have to learn a lot to do a reasonable font choice, typography, layout (from @chris)

    @paperdigits thoughts: I hope to provide some reasonable layouts via the Scrapbook feature. I can suggest fonts and general design patterns. I can include a few tasteful font styles along with the Scrapbook stuff.

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Sorting and positioning
Might not be the best method but how about generating a simple list that a script would read? E.g.,

Position ImageName
1A IMG_48
1B IMG_76
2A IMG_01

Just an example. It could be something more sophisticated.

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Yes, that’s what I meant by:

:slight_smile:

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Geeqie collections can be exported as an ordered list of filenames.

Geeqie has a basic GUI for creating and ordering images in collections.

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@paperdigits, just FYI, I decided to go with Scribus for this year’s family photo calendars. This changed my workflow a bit (coming from Inkscape), and I hope to have time to report on my workflow soon here on pixls.us. But let me first finish the calendars. A short teaser anyhow …

My workflow involves now

  • LuaLaTeX with TikZ and the tikzcalendar library to design an individual calendar strip to place on every page
  • I had to design a new font with 2 symbols for marking the time change because I found no suitable symbol anywhere else. The font symbols were designed in Inkscape as svg font, then imported into fontforge and exported as OTF which was read by LuaLaTeX
  • Image editing and management in darktable, of course
  • Everything comes together in Scribus. The calendar strip is imported from pdf, the calendar is exported as single jpg files for upload to the print shop.

Here’s an example preview:
image

Some issues with Scribus I already stumbled upon:

  • The exported images have a 1 pixel wide white strip on the left. The background image is exactly aligned to the (0,0) position, so this is a bug.
  • If I export to pdf and select to remove the bleed (option “crop to print borders” in German, don’t know the untranslated string, and option “use document bleed config” or similar), the pdf content is cropped but the page shows a white border of the size of the bleed instead. How do I crop correctly?
  • The pdf import dialog shows greyd out options to import multiple pages. That option would be handy to import the calendar strip but is for unknown reason not available.
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What version of Scribus are you using?

I dig your calendar layout!

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I agree. That is a nice calendar design you have there!

Cool! By that do you mean the clock symbol that prefixes 25? If so, it does not exactly match the moon phase symbols; the baseline appears to be a bit higher and the clock a bit larger. Hope you don’t mind me pointing this out :slight_smile:.

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14 posts were split to a new topic: Daylight savings icons for awesome photo calendar

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No problem, it’s not optimal yet, I want to automate some more things, but it works.

\RequirePackage{luatex85}
\documentclass[tikz]{standalone}

\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage[spelling=new, babelshorthands=true]{german}

\usepackage[german]{translator}

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{calendar}

\usepackage{fontspec}

\defaultfontfeatures{Ligatures={TeX},Scale=1.3}
\setmainfont{TeX Gyre Pagella}

\usepackage{etoolbox}

\usepackage{mathabx,wasysym}

\newcount\mooncounter
\def\moonreset{\global\mooncounter=-1\relax}
\moonreset

\def\moon{%
    \global\advance\mooncounter by 1\relax%
    \ifcase\mooncounter $\newmoon$%
        \or             $\rightmoon$%
        \or             $\fullmoon$%
        \or             $\leftmoon$\global\mooncounter=-1\relax%
    \fi%
}

\begin{document}

\tikzset{hcol/.style=black!70,
bgstyle/.style={fill=white,opacity=.7,minimum width=3.5cm,minimum height=207mm}}

\global\advance\mooncounter by 2\relax

\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[bgstyle] (a) {};
\node at (a) {\tikz\calendar [
dates=2018-01-01 to 2018-01-31,
day list downward,
%month yshift=1em,
month label left vertical,
month text={\Huge \%mt},
every month/.append style={yshift=1em}
]
if (weekend) [hcol]
if (equals = 2018-1-2,
            equals = 2018-1-8,
            equals = 2018-1-17,
            equals = 2018-1-24,
            equals = 2018-1-31) [day text = \moon\,\%d-];};
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

LuaLaTeX is required and my time shift font is not included here, plus you would have to add more months, I only included one month without the time shift to demonstrate the concept. Full code later, when everything is ready.

I borrowed parts of this solution from several posts at https://tex.stackexchange.com. I really want to post an update/tutorial once the calendars are done. Hope time permits to finish things soon.

Why would you? The project is a family calendar with pictures of e.g. my son, given as a christmas gift to the grandparents. Therefore, I chose a more pleasant serif font (TeX Gyre Pagella is an extension of the well-known URW Palladio which is itself a clone of the original Palatino design by Hermann Zapf; Before somebody cries out about font plagiarism, the font extension was a project of the worldwide TeX community which was lucky to have Zapf as a supporter, so most probably he at least tolerated these activities). For me it’s one of the most beautiful and at the same time useful serif fonts available, which works as display font as well as for running text and is warm and cozy and at the same time geometrically accurate and has its own, special, fanciness. I love the “Q”, really! Or check the “x” …

A sans serif font would IMO be too sterile. I had more fancy fonts for the month names during the last years, to compensate the limits of the Inkscape calendar script. Having TeX aboard, things change dramatically and I have the freedom to do a well thought overall design. Still, the time shift symbols don’t fit, any idea?

I got the idea to work with TeX again from the recent addition to the TeX world, https://github.com/pro­found-labs/wall­cal­en­dar/tree/mas­ter/doc/ex­am­ples. The calendar design offered by this package is already very pleasant, but it lacks a landscape oriented version. Going with TeX alone would have 2 additional problems, there is no clear concept about colour management, and, working with bleed and exact page sizes is possible but there is no automated, built-in functionality for that such that you would have to care for it yourself. (Now I realize that Scribus is also not too easy to handle at this point.)

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