2004.12_a Linux Newspaper-Professional Layout in Linux with Scribus.pdf

Linux for Layout: Scribus

KNOW HOW

A Linux Newspaper

In this first installment of a three-

part series, former newspaper art

director Jason Walsh looks at pub-

lishing 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

penetration of Linux thus-far has

not been in the taking over of gen-

eralized desktop computer usage;

instead it has been by systematically

attacking niche areas of computing,

notably web serving, scientific com-

puting, and code development. It is

indisputable that this has been a major

success – Linux now effectively owns

several key areas of computing.

One area where Linux has not been

making major inroads is publishing, an

industry that remains the almost exclu-

sive preserve of the Apple Macintosh.

After years of directing potential users to

complex and unwieldy applications such

as LayTeX, Linux finally has some excel-

lent WYSIWYG desktop publishing tools.

In this series. we will produce four

dummy newspaper pages under Linux

and have them appraised by David

Hunter at the pre-press department of

the Belfast News Letter, the world’s

oldest continuously published daily Eng-

lish-language newspaper.

Programmers amongst you may wish

to think of this mini-publication as the

“Hello World” of Linux desktop publish-

ing.

are already familiar with from using

Photoshop and Illustrator. Neither Quark

nor InDesign is available for Linux, nor

are they likely to be any time soon.

A brief History of Publishing

Prior to the development of WYSIWYG

desktop publishing systems, the produc-

tion of newspapers and magazines was a

complicated and arcane process involv-

ing specialist equipment such as linotype

machines, process cameras, and bromide

prints. The graphical user interface of

the Apple Macintosh and its original

killer app, Pagemaker, changed that for-

ever. Finally layout was accessible to

anyone, at least anyone who could afford

a Mac and a copy of Pagemaker.

Pagemaker’s dominance has long since

dwindled to the point where it is a fringe

product used largely by businesses to put

together newsletters. The major applica-

tion in the professional publishing world

is Quark XPress In the late-1990s a seri-

ous challenger to Quark’s dominance

arrived from the Adobe stable: InDesign.

InDesign offers most of the features of

Quark Xpress, as well as many new fea-

tures not found in Quark, all with the

Adobe user interface, which designers

Introducing Scribus

All is not lost however. In typical open-

source fashion, when an application was

not available, a group of developers got

together to produce a free alternative.

That alternative is Scribus (see Figure 1).

Installing Scribus is reasonably

straightforward – unfortunately, no uni-

versally compatible binary packages are

available, but compiling is a simple

enough matter:

./configure

make

make install

Then configure. Alternatively, RPMs

are available for RedHat systems, while

Gentoo and Debian are also supported.

Page Maker

For our project we are working with spe-

cific, predefined requirements. The end

www.linux-magazine.com December 2004

Linux Layout with Scribus

T he key to the increasing industrial

KNOW HOW

Linux for Layout: Scribus

result will be a number

of pages from a tabloid

newspaper. The first step

is to define the shape and

size of your page, along

with some common para-

meters: margins and

columns.

Figure 2 shows the Lay-

out Properties dialog in

Quark XPress 6 on Mac

OS X. (Layout > Layout

Properties) . If you are con-

verting to Scribus from

Quark, step one is to copy

down this basic data and

enter it into Scribus. If

you are creating a new

layout, define equivalent

layout properties as

required.

Why not simply import the original

Quark template into Scribus? Unfortu-

nately, Scribus cannot import files from

other layout applications. As the devel-

opers themselves say, “DTP file formats

are very complex internally – probably

the most complex on a PC. Creating

import/export filters is a task far more

complex than importing a spreadsheet or

simpler word processing file formats.”

This is an impediment, but it is not an

uncommon problem. Adobe InDesign

can open files from Quark 4 but not

Quark 5 or 6. Quark cannot open any

InDesign files whatsoever, nor can Quark

Ve rsion 6 “save down” to Version 4.

Showing a degree of forward thinking

and openness that neither Quark nor

Adobe display, Scribus uses XML stan-

dards for its native file format, meaning

that it may be possible to open Scribus

files in other layout applications in the

future.

“Tabloid” in US-terms generally refers

to a specific page size of 279.4mm x

431.8mm. In Europe, tabloid is a more

general term referring to a roughly A3

newspaper page size, half the size of a

broadsheet produced on the same press.

The New Document dialog in Scribus

is where the basic page is initially cre-

ated (see Figure 3). The page that we are

creating will serve as a template for all

subsequent front pages (and in fact, for

all other pages, albeit in a slightly modi-

fied form). Our templates are very basic,

simply defining the size and shape of the

Figure 1: Scribus running on Suse 9.1. Finally, professional-quality desktop

publishing comes to Linux.

Within this central rectangle,

we will later define our main lay-

out of five columns of text.

Scribus handles columns in a

slightly different manner from

other DTP apps – more on that

later – but the design is efficient

and very usable.

The New Document dialog has

a few other options: Automatic

text frames fills the printable area

with a text frame on every newly

created page, handy for long doc-

ument creation such as book

design, but not relevant here.

The remaining options are

related to imposition. Make sure

you check the Facing Pages

option, which calls for a layout in

two-page spreads.

When the pages are printed, they are

in pairs. The front and back pages are

together and are folded in the middle

and wrapped around the next set and so

on. A complete newspaper is produced

from several files with varying number

of pages, rather than from a single file

containing the entire newspaper. This

design allows different pages to be pro-

duced at different times (and by different

persons), and it stops the Scribus files

from becoming unmanageably large.

page and whether it will be left of right

facing.

Our project is 297mm x 386mm;

slightly squatter than most tabloids and

roughly analogous with the size of the

British Independent newspaper. This

means we enter the page width as

297mm and height as 386mm.

Printing right to the edge of the page

(called full-bleed in the industry) is com-

mon in magazines, but rare in

newspapers as the presses are generally

not capable of it. Even when it is possi-

ble, it is never called for on the front

page. We need to define a printable area,

and we do this by setting margin guides

in the New Document dialog. These

properties are defined by the press and

differ from newspaper to newspaper. In

our case, the margins are set up as: Top,

29mm; Bottom, 16mm; Inside 8mm;

Outside 23mm.

The margins are set un-

evenly in order to create a

rectangular box of 265mm x

340mm-this is the minimum

printable area on each page-

in the correct position.

On some pages, items can

be outside this central rectan-

gle; on others it would result

in items not being printed.

This is an issue of pagination

and page imposition that is,

again, set by the newspaper

press rather than the

designer, so we shall not be

dealing with it in detail here.

Frame Based Layout

Some open-source commentators have

complained about the Scribus interface,

criticizing it as not suitable for the home

user. (This is a strange criticism of a

piece of software aimed at the profes-

sional user.) Both Quark XPress and

Adobe InDesign doubtlessly seem

Figure 2: The Layout Properties menu in Quark XPress display-

ing the page defaults for the East Belfast Observer.

December 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

Linux for Layout: Scribus

KNOW HOW

Figure 3: The New Document dialog in Scribus. In this dialog the basic format

of the page is defined. Here we have used the EBO settings taken from the

original Quark file.

at the press. There

are too many

variables to be

absolutely confi-

dent, and many of

them cannot be

controlled from

the desktop. The

grade and type of

paper used, the

quality and viscos-

ity of ink, the type

and age of the

press, and the skill

of the printers will

all have a massive effect on the final

output.

One of the areas that is hardest to get

right is reproduction of color, and

although all of the issues listed above

will have an impact, it is important to

ensure that before you send files to press

that they are of as high a quality as

possible.

Color is a surprisingly complex sub-

ject. Built-in color management was one

of the major advantages enjoyed by the

Macintosh as a print production platform

– and one of Linux’s major disadvan-

tages. Until now.

Color management is a technology

used to calibrate the color of input

devices, display devices, and output

devices. The key principle is that of the

“working space.” This is a color refer-

ence that is not tied to any specific

device, commonly “sRGB”, a basic addi-

tive color profile suitable for most

monitors. The problem with this is that

the output device, be it the monitor or a

printer, must make a transformation

from sRGB to its native color space and

the quality of this transformation will be

dictated by the quality of the device dri-

ver.

A better method is the use of an Inter-

national Color Consortium compatible

color management system. The ICC

defined an open standard for Color

Matching Modules, preferably defined at

OS level, and color profiles both for the

devices and the working space.

Color management technology can be

implemented in the operating system, in

the API, or directly in an application. For

years now, Mac OS has included Apple’s

own color management software, Color-

Sync. Now Linux has a compatible

solution in the form of LittleCMS. Home

users may not need to install LittleCMS,

but for professional output it is a must.

LittleCMS includes standard ICC color

profiles and thus with LittleCMS

installed, PDF files produced in Scribus

will be printed just as they appear on

screen. Without it you’ll be guessing

how any given color will come out in

print.

It’s important to note that LittleCMS is

not an application in its own right, rather

it is a programmers’ library that can be

used in application development –

Scribus is one of the applications that

makes use of it. If you install it before

installing Scribus, Scribus will automa-

tically use it.

Sadly, in Linux, the only mainstream

bitmap image editor that supports color

management is Corel Photopaint. Hope-

fully the availability of LittleCMS will

encourage GIMP developers to get on

board sooner rather than later.

The most important aspect of using a

color management system is remember-

ing to activate it! When it comes to

exporting our final PDFs, we’ll go over

this in detail, but for now have a look at

File>Export>Save Page as PDF . In the

dialog box that appears, choose the color

tab. If you have LittleCMS installed, you

will see a drop-down menu under PDF/

X-3. This menu contains the press pro-

files – consult your printer and choose

the relevant one.

In the case of this dummy, the correct

profile is Euroscale Uncoated v2. This is

beause Euroscale is an attempt to pro-

counter-intuitive to amateurs, but pub-

lishing is a complex business – this is not

word processing.

A greater problem facing Scribus is the

fact that a stable, universally compatible

binary is not available. Expecting design-

ers and journalists to compile software

from source is ridiculous and will be a

serious impediment to Scribus’ potential

adoption in the industry. Believe it or

not, there are hundreds of publications

without IT departments; with a Mac-

based system they simply don’t need

in-house IT support.

The principal objection to Scribus

seems to be in its use of a dual modality:

layout is frame based; that is, every

object is contained within a frame and

can be manipulated in two ways – as an

object, or as content.

This method of working is common to

both Quark and InDesign and is in fact a

very efficient way of separating design

from content. Furthermore, it is essential

for Scribus to offer a comfortable environ-

ment to print professionals, be they

designers, journalists or sub-editors, if it is

to make serious inroads into publishing.

Once you become accustomed to it,

this manner of working is quite produc-

tive: to place text on the page, you must

create a text frame first, and then insert,

or type, text into this frame. In order to

place an image on the page, you create

an image frame and then import the

photo or graphic into this frame. The

frames and the content that they contain

can then be manipulated independently.

Scribus in use

Despite Quark’s dominance in the publish-

ing industry some newspapers are moving

to other solutions. The now defunct Dublin

Daily used Adobe InDesign, as does Dublin’s

Lucan Gazette and the Condé Nast maga-

zine, Cosmo Girl .

Until recently no publications were known

to be using Scribus, however that has begun

to change. The Twin Tier Times ,a small

weekly newspaper distributed in southern

New York state and northern Pennsylvania

has developed a workflow that not only

incorporates Scribus, but is actually centered

on it, using no other layout application.

According to the Scribus team, two other

newspapers are using Scribus for day-to-day

production.

Color Management

Printing is as much of an art as a science,

and it is perfectly possible to know

everything about it and still face disaster

www.linux-magazine.com December 2004

KNOW HOW

Linux for Layout: Scribus

Output

Figure 4: The East Belfast Observer’s nameplate.

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 cre-

ated, it will print correctly on a wide range of

output devices, including inkjet printers, dig-

ital presses, and four-color offset press.

vide a generic press profile for Europe.

North American and Japanese options

are also available, Web/SWOP and Japan

Color respectively, so if you live in Amer-

ica or Japan, choosing the relevant

profile will result in improved results.

Uncoated refers to the paper type; many

magazines are printed on expensive

coated paper, though newspapers are

not.

In order to know why color manage-

ment is essential, it is necessary to

understand the basic principles of offset

printing, as it differs significantly from

inkjet printing.

Offset printing, or lithography, is the

process by which newspapers are

printed. Files are passed through a RIP,

or Raster Image Processor, which con-

verts the layout into a PostScript image.

Each page becomes a single image,

which is then output to film and trans-

ferred onto an aluminum plate.

This plate is fixed to a drum and rolled

through water, which adheres to the neg-

ative areas of the image. Then the plate

is rolled through ink, which adheres to

the positive areas; next, a drum covered

with rubber is rolled over the plate,

squeezing away the water and picking

up the ink. This drum is then rolled over

paper, transferring the ink onto the

paper.

Color is printed by sepa-

rating the colors into four

single plates, one for each

color used in the printing

process. This process is

called color separation. In

order for this process to

work correctly, color ele-

ments such as photographs

or graphics must be in the

CMYK colorspace. Screen

images on a computer are

usually in RGB format, Red,

Green and Blue. These are

the additive primary colors

used to form secondary and

tertiary colors with light.

With ink, it is necessary to

use the subtractive pri-

maries, Red, Yellow and

Blue. In printing, these are

substituted with

Magenta, Yellow and Cyan,

which offers a wider range of

printable colors. The order in

which the colors are printed

is Cyan first, then Magenta,

and then Yellow – CMY. The

“K” stands for Key, which is

the registration color, Black.

Without the final black plate,

the result would be that

“black” elements such as

type, would be dark brown,

purple, or green.

If you print an RGB file on

an inkjet printer, some of the

colors will be “out of gamut,”

that is, outside of the range of

printable colors. An annoy-

ance, but not a disaster.

If you are outputting to a

CMYK press, it is therefore vital to

appropriately map the RGB colors seen

on-screen to colors that are printable in

the CMYK gamut.

Moreover, if you send RGB files

through the RIP, it will

not recognize them as

color images and will

print them as a single

film. The end result will

be particularly murky

greyscale images.

Using CMYK colors

means you won’t

accidentally end up with

a monochrome page;

using color management

means that the colors

you see in your proofs

will be just like the end

result.

Figure 6: The Scribus Proper-

ties dialog, where you can

adjust almost any aspect of

an object.

Page Elements

Pages consist of three

basic elements: text,

graphics, and white

space. The ratio of each

will depend on what you

are designing; advertisements differ sig-

nificantly from editorial content, and

editorial pages will differ from publica-

tion to publication and even within

publications.

With some notable exceptions, such as

France’s Libération and the UK’s

Guardian , newspaper design is unin-

spired. That is not to say that

newspapers are necessarily badly

designed, just that the criteria are differ-

ent from other areas of graphic design.

The two key aspects of newspaper

design are: ease of reading and ease of

layout. The former is important because

a newspaper must be digested quickly by

a general readership, rather than a spe-

cialist one. Being consistent and

conforming to certain basic rules will

make the task of reading easier. The lat-

Figure 5: After exporting the nameplate from the drawing pro-

gram – in our case Inkscape – open it in GIMP and change it

into a 1-bit image by selecting Image>Mode>Indexed and

choosing a 1-bit Palette with no dithering.

December 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

Linux for Layout: Scribus

KNOW HOW

ter aspect is important because, unlike

magazines, which generally have a

monthly turnaround, newspapers tend to

be daily and there is significantly

increased pressure on the layout team.

For our dummy newspaper, the first ele-

ment is the nameplate (see Figure 4).

Often mistakenly referred to as the mast-

head, the nameplate is the name of the

newspaper at the top of the front page. In

this case, the typefaces used are Gill Sans

Light Italic and Gill Sans Bold Condensed.

For this dummy newspaper, our name-

plate is a high resolution TIFF file that

was created in Inkscape, exported, and

then converted into a 1-bit TIFF at a res-

olution of 600 dots per inch (see Figure

5). 600dpi is an incredibly high resolu-

tion, especially when you consider that

the press we shall be using prints at

around 180dpi, so why bother with such

a massive resolution?

Files that use a 1-bit colorspace are

black and white; not greyscale, but liter-

ally black and white. Generally speaking,

1-bit TIFFs are used for line art. The

advantage in using a 1-bit colorspace is

that the color of the lines (or in our case

type) can be changed within the page

layout application, so a single source file

can be used for multiple variations of the

same image. The downside of 1-bit

images is that they degrade at low reso-

lutions – even at 300dpi a 1-bit image

will begin to display ragged edges.

To import the nameplate, select Insert

Picture , the third icon in the toolbar, and

draw a frame the entire width of the

printable area between the two margins.

Next, select File>Import>Get Picture .

After selecting the appropriate file, select

Tools>Properties to reach the Scribus

Properties dialog (See Figure 6) and

select Image . Select the Scale to Frame

Size option, making sure that the propor-

tional button is checked. The nameplate

should now be the width of the newspa-

per front page, excluding the margins.

Above the nameplate are three boxes,

which highlight content inside the news-

paper. These boxes are empty image

frames that have been colored using the

Tools>Properties>Colors dialog. Directly

below the nameplate are the date and

issue number of the newspaper and its

price. Both are created as text elements

in Scribus in the normal manner. It is

also possible to create the nameplate as a

normal text frame within Scribus, but as

it is an unchanging element, it is better

to use a graphic file, lest a typo should

creep in over time.

The next element to include is text. In

terms of text entry, it is inefficient to type

directly into Scribus. Even if you have a

huge monitor, you’ll spend a lot of time

zooming in and out to read parts of the

pages. Instead, prepare all text you wish

to add to the file in a word processor like

OpenOffice Writer, spell-check it, and

then import it into Scribus.

At this point, you must save the text as

plain text before importing it into Scribus.

Scribus cannot import any form of styled

text, be it Rich Text Format (RTF) or the

native OpenOffice file format. This lack of

support for formatted text may change

soon – Scribus’ developers are working

on RTF importing. Support for RTF would

give the user the ability to import text

styles, such as boldface, italics and so on,

along with the text.

We’ll be discussing how to work with

text in detail next month, but for now

let’s just concentrate on getting some

text into the layout.

Getting the text in is a simple business:

select the Insert Text Frame button from

the Scribus toolbar and draw a frame on

the page, roughly where you want the

text to go. Next, select File>Import>Get

Te x t . The text from the chosen file will

flow into the selected frame.

To edit the text, select Edit Contents of

Frame from the toolbar and use the I-

beam cursor to select the text as you

would in any ordinary word processor.

Alternatively, you can use the Story Edi-

tor (also on the toolbar) to edit the text.

Conclusion

This article introduced you to Scribus, a

professional-quality Open Source layout

application for Linux. In next month’s

issue, you’ll learn more about managing

text and graphics in the Scrubus environ-

ment.

■

Jason Walsh was the

art director on the

East Belfast Observer

from launch in Janu-

ary 2004, until July

2004, prior to which

he was the art direc-

tor for the Irish glossy

magazines, Gorgeous and CityCraic.

These days he works as a journalist and

has contributed to Linux Magazine,

Variant, Mute, the Guardian and many

other newspapers and magazines on

art, design and technology.

A Third, Fourth and Fifth-way

Initial impressions may suggest that there

are relatively few desktop publishing pack-

ages on Linux, but that is not really the case.

Perhaps they’re buried under the mountain

of command-based typesetting software

such as TeX and the traditional UNIX utility,

Troff, and its GNU derivative Groff, but good

GUI DTP tools do exist for Linux.

The main commercial application is

PageStream. Developed by Grasshopper LLC

in the US, PageStream originated on the

Amiga back in the 1980s; the Apple Macin-

tosh’s strong-arm lock on the publishing

industry meant that it never gained currency

in the professional arena. Instead

PageStream found a niche making small

publications such as community group

and church newsletters, nevertheless, it is

a professional quality application and is

available not only for the Amiga and Linux,

but Windows, Mac OS X, and on two some-

what more exotic platforms: MorphOS and

Amiga PowerPC.

In late 1999 Adobe released a beta-test ver-

sion of FrameMaker for Linux. Never really

popular on the Mac, FrameMaker is used for

creating scientific and technical documents.

Currently available only for Windows, Mac

and Solaris/SPARC, but signifying Adobe’s

intention to confine FrameMaker to the tech-

nical publishing market, FrameMaker will no

longer be developed for the Mac OS. What is

curious is why Adobe doesn’t continue to

develop FrameMaker for Linux – a market

obsessed with technical documentation.

If you’re determined to use only open source

software, two further options are Xclamation

and Passepartout.

Xclamation, developed by Axene is part

of the Axena office suite. Xclamation is a

full-featured DTP app that uses the Motif

toolkit and as such, should run on virtually

any UNIX OS.

The final alternative is Passepartout. Where

Scribus is a KDE application, Passepartout is a

native GNOME app, offering those who pre-

fer the GNOME GUI and toolkit a native

layout application.

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