Sunday 5 October 2008

Words, type and faces

Scribus is wonderful. It has turned into a pro publishing tool even I can use (but get a 1.3.3.12 backport into hardy, already! Bug 6692 is horrible!), and with a few hours of exploration I've managed to reproduce a rpg splatbook page exactly. Only difference I can tell now is that the book paper is thinner and a bit yellowed compared to my fresh new printer paper, and it is of course some American page size and not A4. Headers, footers, typefaces, spacing, etc. match exactly. Imagine that.

WhatTheFont is handy for finding the correct fonts. Scan, crop, upload, browse. Copying fonts into ~/.fonts/ and having them show up is a convenient scribus-specific goodie, scribus knowing far more than the average program about fonts and preferring to handle them itself, TYVM.

potrace is handy, tracing a bitmap image into a fairly good SVG. (SVG not being an option in a scribus image frame is weird. Import=>SVG is a bit less than intuitive.)

Next step: automating things a bit with scripting. Mwahaha.