My images I left as RGB, some of which have embedded profiles (from the digital camera), some do not (from my scanner).
The other settings I left as "perceptual", "relative colourimetric" and blackpoint compensation on. I have RGB images, colours and monitor set to sRGB, and CMYK colours, images and crucially the printer set to the Blurb profile. For each project, activate colour management from File>Document Setup>Colour Management. Copy it to /usr/share/color/icc and re-start Scribus.
First obtain the Blurb colour profile from here. Add these under Page>Manage Guides, and take heed of the co-ordinate system as noted above.ĥ) Set up colour management for each of your projects. I use single page again, and add guides to show me where with spine and flaps are. You're done, and Scribus displays your pages nicely side-by-side as if you opened the book: great for sorting those double-page spreads.Ĥ) Set up a separate Scribus project for the cover. Finally, I set margins so as to define the safe boundaries.
The absolute top left of the pdf page will be (-x_bleed,-y_bleed). Note that when working on the pages, the coordinate (0,0) is at the top left of the page trim, inside the bleed area. The width and height should be set to the page size/trim line as your finished book will be, the extra bleed space is added with the "bleeds" tab. Anyway, I like to work in points for measurements and so does Scribus.ģ) Set up your Scribus project for the pages! Since blurb uses single pages not traditional signatures, so choose "single page", then how many single pages you want. Reminds me of the argument with my husband over what constitutes a "round of sandwiches". By number of pages, Blurb means printed sides of paper, not leaves of paper, and it has to be an even number to include the first page on the right when you open the book, and the last page on the left as you close it. I print this page to file for easy reference during the design process. Remember which you picked because you have to tell Blurb what you chose when you come to upload your PDF. You'll be invited to choose things like paper-type, book size, number of pages and cover type. This is on the "PDF to book" section of Blurb's website, and you need to "get specs".
Gah! Although probably it wouldn't change by too much and maybe you don't care about image positions to the nearest pnt.Ģ) Find out what your book measurements will be. This step helps you find how many pages you'll need for your book and I can't stress how important it is to know that before starting! I can't imagine the bother if you decide to add more later and blurb decides your measurements need to change and you have to re-tweak the positions of all your images. You could do this on paper, or I like to make a rough layout in something like LibreOffice Impress. Plan your book thoroughly by sorting a rough layout and choosing what goes on what page. So, here are the steps I go through to make a book with Scribus and Blurb.ġ) Assemble all your stuff in a folder. My monitor is certainly NOT colour-calibrated. I post settings here that have worked for me, and make no guarantees they will work for you. I don't care much for colour profiles except ones that make it work, and I don't much understand what I'm doing in that department. I'm no expert, but I've done this twice now, and thought I'd post the settings and steps that worked for me. So, for those of us taking the third linux-y way, we have the wonderous Scribus. They have some lovely software to download, apparently, but if you click "not on Windows!", it offers you another version of the software and the button changes to "not on Mac!", and if you click button that it goes back to "not on Windows!".
I like to make books to publish with Blurb, and I like to have full creative control of the process and work offline.