Scribus Typesetting Usi…

Document Notes
This document was prepared by Lynn Whelmed, @notwhelmedyet. It
is a draft document that is still being improved. It can be viewed
online at:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vqWwJQAV0tCK3mK5w6qzjuS8zM8KDV
GDaAE5nhjshh0/

If you have questions or comments, you can contact me via email at

[email protected]

You can find me online at:

● https://notwhelmedyet.tumblr.com/
● https://twitter.com/notwhelmedyet
● https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_whelmed_yet

The document was inspired by ArmoredSuperHeavy’s How to Make

a Book guide

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You can share
and adapt this document so long as you provide attribution, do not
use it for commercial purposes and do not apply a more restrictive
copyright to your final works.

How to Typeset an AO3 Document for

Bookbinding In Scribus
This is a guide to using pre-made templates I’ve prepared for
typesetting for bookbinding. Both templates assume you’re using
8.5x11 inch paper. There are two templates with different margins:

● 0.8 inch margins on all sides, assuming you will not be

trimming the book block at all

● Similar margins, but assuming you’ll trim a half inch from

the top and bottom of the book and a quarter inch from the
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 the top and bottom of the book and a quarter inch from the
outside edge. You could use this template without trimming &
end up with extremely generous margins

If you’d rather set up your own document from scratch, I plan to

make a supplementary guide explaining how to do that. Send me an
email to hurry me along

You can access my templates and demo files via this google drive
folder
● The templates make use of the Lora and Novo Deco fonts
(There will be links later in the What You Need to Get Started
Section)
There are also a series of demo files, showing an example short
typesetting project based using one of my fics.
● The demo makes use of the template fonts and also
Copperplate Gothic Light and Bergamot Ornaments

Why You Might Use Scribus For

Typesetting
Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing program. It’s closest
commercial analog is Adobe InDesign - both programs whose
primary purpose is designing pages with text & graphics and
exporting them for printing. The primary reason you’d use Scribus for
bookbinding (to my mind) is either:

● You want to use a desktop publishing program but can’t

access InDesign due to cost (or running Linux as your OS,
*cough cough*)

● You don’t have access to Microsoft Word & are looking for a
viable alternative

If you do have access to Word, I’d recommend checking out the

instructions written by @armoredsuperheavy and see if that workflow
better suits your project. I’ll be referencing it a few times in here for
formatting.

A Side Note On Ethics

My assumption writing this guide is that you either are the author of
the document you’re printing, or you’ve gotten permission from the
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 the document you’re printing, or you’ve gotten permission from the
author. While there is nothing to stop you from printing and binding
other people’s writing if you are keeping them for your private use, if
it is at all possible to get permission I would highly recommend
doing so. Also if you’re not the author & have the means to do so:
consider offering to gift the author a copy of the finished book.
Fandom is a gift economy!

OBVIOUSLY do not sell other people’s writing without permission.

That should go without saying.

What You Need to Get Started

We’re going to need the following programs:

● Any text editor and word processor to prepare your text

● The program Scribus (I’m using a very old version. If you

update your linux OS regularly you probably have a cooler,
fancier version)

○ https://www.scribus.net/

● This amazing Java program called “Bookbinder” that we’ll

use to make signatures out of the finished PDF. You can
download it here:

○
http://www.quantumelephant.co.uk/bookbinder/bookbi
nder.html

● The template of your choice

We’re also going to need fonts:

● My templates make use of the following fonts, which you’ll
need to install for them to render correctly:
○ Google Font Repository font Lora
○ Novo Deco Ornaments

You may want to change these fonts to other ones that better match
your vision for the book. I limited myself to one font for the templates,
but I’ll show images with more fun fonts later. I’ve included some
guidance on book fonts below:
● Body text: For the main body of your book readability is
:
 ● Body text: For the main body of your book readability is
super important. You want a font designed for print that isn’t
distracting.
○ If you have Microsoft, you might have access to
Garamond or Palatino Linotype, which are both very
popular body text fonts
○ If not, I recommend keeping Lora for the body text or
using EB Garamond
● You may also want a more stylized font for your title, and
possibly chapter, page number and scene styling. Go wild
here, tbh. You can reuse your body text font if you want, but
there’s nothing stopping you from grabbing a fun font that
reflects the tone/genre of the story.
○ Places to look for fonts:
■ Google Font Foundry - all open source
■ Blambot Fonts - designed for comics but I
love these fonts. A limited selection are
available free for non-profit uses, click around
■ Free font websites like DaFont - These sites
should list the usage rights for the font. Double
check that your usage is allowed by the font
creator.
● You may also want fonts for scene breaks and decorative
elements - you can use a dingbats font or an image, but using
a font will be much easier.
○ The Windows font Wingdings includes many
symbols, but you can also look online for something
that better suits the style of your book.
https://www.dafont.com/mtheme.php?id=7 Always
check the usage permissions for fonts online.
○ I highly recommend Bergamot Ornaments or Novo
Deco Ornaments, if you don’t want to dig too deep

Step One: Exploring & Styling the

Template
Save the template of your choice and make sure you have the font
Lora installed on your computer before opening it in Scribus. You’ll
see a document with some filler information in it, which we’re using
to demonstrate the current page and font styles.

The current design is honestly painfully generic, so we’re going to

start customizing the template for your book. Since that
customization will be editing the styles and master pages (page
templates) for the book, we’ll then be able to clear the filler text and
replace it with your document. We’ll then just have to apply the right
styles to the right section of the document.
Image: Screenshot of two pages from the template with their default
formatting
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 formatting

Test Printing
You’re going to want to print out a test document once you think you
have your styles the way you want them. You can do that at any time
using the instructions in Exporting & Printing.

Using the Styles Window to Customize Fonts

First save a copy of the template to be your active editing version
(always a good habit). Then go to Edit->Styles. The style manager
will come up, displaying all of the paragraph and character styles
supplied in the template.

Paragraph styles are what you’ll primarily use. Here are the
paragraph styles I provided and their purposes:
● Default Paragraph Style - The default style used for all body
text in the book.
○ Chapter Starts - This style inherits everything from
Default, except it isn’t indented. It is used for the first
paragraph of each chapter (and the first paragraph of
scenes, if you so choose).
○ Dedications and Quotes - A centered italic style that
you can use for dedications, quotes, in-universe
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 you can use for dedications, quotes, in-universe
poems etc.
● Ephemera - I like to include a copyright page with small
print text. Sometimes I put it in a san-serif font.
● Ornaments - Decorative ornaments are used for decorating
your text - they can mark scene breaks and also ornament
splash pages or chapter starts. This style uses a dingbat font
to put illustrations on the page without you having to play
around with placing images.
● Page Numbers - Used for numbering pages
● Titles - A large display font, for splash pages with titles or
maybe act breaks
○ Chapter Titles - This style inherits everything from
titles, except it displays smaller. It is used for chapter
titles, and maybe headers for acknowledgement
pages or appendixes.

You can always go back and make additional styles. Some example
additional styles you might want to create:
● Act Break Titles (if your story has Act Breaks and you want
to customize them)
● Chapter Titles 2 (if you want 2 contrasting fonts for your
chapter titles/chapter numbers)
● Epistolary (if you have in-universe diary entries or letters
that deserve a custom font)
● Test Messages (if you have in-universe text messages that
deserve a custom font)
● Appendix Headers (if you decide to create appendices and
don’t like using your Chapter Title font for the headers)
● Scene Starts (if you customize the Chapter Starts style so it
has drop caps but don’t want drop caps for the start of all
your scenes)

To customize Text Styles:

For more information check out the Scribus wiki page on text
styles (I’ve borrowed some wording from their instructions) I’ll
provide more guidance on design choices for styling the chapter
headers, scene breaks and page numbers in the following sections.
These instructions will apply to all of those sections.

You can edit any style by clicking on the style name and then
selecting “Edit”.

There are two tabs: properties and character style when you’re
editing a paragraph style

The properties tab has settings for various attributes of the text in
relationship to lines, other paragraphs, the margins and tabulators, but
nothing about the font itself. In the properties tab you can (see image
below for number code):
1. Change the spacing between lines of text - if you’re using
:
 1. Change the spacing between lines of text - if you’re using
fixed linespacing, this should always be the font size or larger.
Generous white space makes it easier to read the body text!
2. Add space before or after paragraphs - I usually leave this
as zero
3. Change the justification to one of the following settings
a. Left Aligned
b. Centered
c. Right Aligned
d. Justified with the last line of each paragraph left
aligned - the standard option for body text
e. All Lines Justified - Do not use this for body text,
your writing will look hecking weird
4. Optical Margins - This allows punctuation to go slightly
outside of the text frame when necessary to make your
writing look good. Optical margins are good for body text.
5. Drop Caps - Makes the first letter of your paragraph big, for
emphasis. You can use these for the Chapter Start style to
make an eyecatching chapter design.
6. Minimum Space Width - allows Scribus to shrink the size of
white space to allow it to even out justification where
necessary (avoiding large blocks of white space). I don’t like
enabling this for a whole document, but you can.
7. Glyph Extension - allows Scribus to shrink or grow
individual characters slightly to allow it to even out justification
where necessary. I usually use 97-103% here; don’t go too
drastic, you don’t want the reader to visually notice the
differently sized characters.
8. Tabulators and indentation - The only thing I use here is
the “first line indent” option, but you can play around with
indentation to get the look you like.
:
 The character style tab has settings for the font itself. Remember that a
few styles are inheriting their font from the Base Text character style
(that’d be Default, Dedications and Quotes and Chapter Starts) so if you
want to edit their font & font size edit from the character style. Otherwise,
refer to the image below for the number coding:
1. Font Family: Select the desired font
2. Style: Select the font style (italic, regular, bold, bold italic etc)
3. Font size
4. Kerning (space between letters) - I would not adjust this unless
you’ve decided to go with a font that has, by default, bad kerning.
Why are you using a font with bad kerning in your document?
5. Space (size of spaces) - I would not adjust this unless you’ve
decided to go with a font that has, by default, overly large or small
spaces. Why are you using a font with bad design in your
document?
6. Special Effects
a. Underline sections of text, including spaces.
b. Underline words but not spaces.
c. Subscript.
d. Superscript.
e. All caps.
f. Small caps.
g. Strikethrough.
h. Outline.
i. Shadow.
7. I forgot to label a number 7, sorry
8. Glyph width - You can shrink or stretch all the text horizontally
via this adjuster. Not recommended.
9. Glyph height - You can shrink or stretch all the text vertically via
this adjuster. Not recommended.
10. Vertical alignment - You can move the glyphs relative to their
center line via this adjuster. Not recommended.
11. Font color - There are by default a limited number of color
options. You can add more colors via the Edit->Colors window.
:
 options. You can add more colors via the Edit->Colors window.
Add a new color by selecting New and then selecting and naming
the color option you need. See below for example.
12. Line color - Only available when you’re using the shadow or
outline effect, you can add more colors via the instructions above
if necessary.
:
 Please remember to use a readable font designed for print for your
default style. Keep the font between 9 and 12 pt. (Some folks believe
9 is too small, but it looks right to me on small pages)

Using the Properties Window

Just going to cover a few fundamentals you might need before we
get into customizing your document. When you right click on any
object in scribus - text, a image frame, etc. you can open the
Properties window.

The properties window has a number of sections. You can find more
details on working with the properties window for images here and
for text here. The main tab you’ll need to use for working with text is
the…….Text Tab. You can edit any text by selecting it and then
changing the settings in the properties window. Generally the bulk of
your formatting will be done by simply applying styles, but you may
sometimes need to make use of this section.

The text tab breaks down further into a number of sections (I’ve
highlighted the ones I expect you’ll actually use):
1. Basic formatting : change the font, font style, font size,
spacing size and justification
2. The sub-tab selector. Click on the relevant section open up
one of the windows shown on the right
3. Colors and Effects - Matches the font effects in the styles
window & the color selection from the styles window. I always
edit these only from the styles window
4. First Line Offset - Honestly I have no idea what this does
and I’ve never touched it
5. Optical Margins - I always edit this only from the styles
window
6. Style Settings - You’ll use this to apply your styles to
selected blocks of text! The broom icon next to the
selector can be used to clear any direct formatting from a
block of text.
7. Column & Text Distances - You might use this to add
multiple columns to an appendix, but otherwise I recommend
only editing this from the style window.
8. Advanced Settings - You’ll use this to fix any
justification spacing errors, if you’re extremely detail
oriented. I’ll cover that in the later sections of the
document.
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 Working With Images

In your book design you may want to place images - illustrations,

images for scene breaks, images for background decoration etc. Test
:
 images for scene breaks, images for background decoration etc. Test
out placing images now during the design phase, but when you
actually set up your document plan to put the images in dead last.
You can find more information about images on the Scribus Wiki.

You’ll want to do this last because images will not shift locations in
response to changes in the text, so it’s best to line them up at the
very end, when you’re sure nothing will shift.

To place an image, go to Insert -> Image frame. Scribus will let you
draw the frame, which will appear as a blank rectangle with an x
through it. Add your image either by dragging an image file onto your
Scribus window and into the box or by right clicking and selecting
“Get Image”.

Resizing the frame after the image is inserted will crop the image.
You can adjust scaling either by right clicking and selecting “Adjust
Image to Frame” or using the properties window to adjust the scale.
Use the Width and Height (1&2 in the labeled properties window)
fields to shrink or grow your image. Make sure the “Link X&Y” icon is
selected (3) so it stays proportional.

Aligning images: to perfectly align images (or any other item) you’ll
want to use the Align and Distribute menu. Open it from Windows-
>Align and Distribute. Change “Relative to” to “Margins” and then
align to your heart’s content. I mostly use this to center images
vertically or horizontally on a page.

If you use an image make sure you have the rights to use it. I like
Freepik as a source for generic design elements. You could also craft
an image yourself (or commission one). You may need to provide
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 an image yourself (or commission one). You may need to provide
attribution somewhere in your document depending on where you
get your images.

Customizing Chapter Styling

And now it’s time to do some designing. Scroll down to the chapter
header page and think about how you’d like your chapter starters to
look. Maybe consult a few books on your shelves, see what looks
good to you.

Some chapter styling will be easier to implement than others.

Anything that relies on font styles and effects for the chapter title and
font-based ornaments can be implemented very easily. If you want to
make a second Chapter Title style (for instance, if you want the
“Chapter One” larger or smaller than the actual chapter titles) use the
Clone option in the styles window. Doing a drop caps for the Chapter
Start style is easy to implement.

Some more effortful options:

● Adding images to the chapter splash pages
● Using colored frames for emphasis
● Making the first several words of each chapter in small-caps

The default style : Title in a all caps font Title in font Raleway, Title font in Grenze
Centered Lora in (Kroftsmann), an top line in white and Gotisch; an
bold 20pt, an image from bottom line in italic. ornament from
ornament beneath Freepik.com inserted Aligned to the “Vintage Decorative
above for decoration, outside of the page. Signs 2” beneath.
drop caps in the I’ve placed a black The first sentence is
Chapter Start style filled box beneath in small caps for
the top line. An emphasis.
easier option to get a
similar effect is to
use a font like this
that has a filled
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 that has a filled
background by
default.

If you want to use drop caps in the Chapter Start style, consider
whether you plan to use it for starting scenes as well. You probably
don’t want drop caps after every scene break. So if you planned to
use the Chapter Start style for scene breaks and you want drop
caps, use the “Clone” option in the Style editor to make a copy you
can name Scene Start and leave drop cap free.

To find the ornament of your choice in a given ornament style, I

recommend opening the web page you downloaded it from, where
there will probably be a character map. What you actually type will
usually be a letter, like N or v, which will display as the image of your
choice.

You’ve probably noticed that my default styling relies on reducing the

height of the text frame on the chapter break page. You can
substitute just adding line breaks before the chapter header, but I
prefer the precision of changing the text frame size. This is one of
the last steps you’ll carry out in finalizing your formatting, don’t worry
about it too much just now.

Customizing Scene Breaks

Often there are two kinds of scene breaks in a story. Minor scene
breaks are simply separated by space, while a major scene break
will utilize a divider. Luckily your original manuscript will tell you
which kind of break to use where, we’re simply going to beautify the
original manuscript’s dividers.

There are many options for classy and/or fun scene breaks for your
manuscript. The option I most highly recommend is use of a
dingbat/ornaments font, where a single character will appear as a
typographic ornament. As mentioned in the Getting Started and
Customizing Fonts sections, there are many dingbats fonts you can
download and choose from.

Another option is use of simple typographic characters to mark your

dividers, such as * * * or ---. I’m not hugely into this design but it does
show up in published books (especially the * * * option). If you want
to do this you’ll want to swap your Ornaments style to the font and
font size used by the body text. You’ll still want to shift the * * * over
to the Ornaments style so they’re all centered.

The third option, which is much more of a pain, is placing actual

images wherever you have a scene break. This has to be done
manually as the last step in your project (because the images will not
move in response to changes in the text) and is a bit of a pain. If you
want to do this, I recommend temporarily placing an asterisk where
:
 want to do this, I recommend temporarily placing an asterisk where
the image will go. It’ll give you something to line up your image with.

Whatever you use for your dividers, I recommend having at least one
line of space above and below the divider. We’ll be setting that up in
the Preparing Your Text section.

Examples:

Using the character M in the ornament font Using an image from this set of coffee
Wings of Wind TFB images on Freepik. You’d probably want to
make the divider smaller for printing (I’ve left
it a bit big so you can see it in the
screenshot).

Using three asterisks in Lora to divide the Using the character T from the ornament
scene. font Bergamot Ornaments

Customizing Headers/Footers
A book, obviously, needs page numbers both for the reader and the
bookbinder. We’re going to place these page numbers using Master
Pages. Master Pages are templates that you can apply to pages or
ranges of pages.

The two most common locations for page numbers are:

● Centered at the bottom of the page
:
 ● Centered at the bottom of the page
● Aligned to the outside of the page on the top

The minimal design is to place only the page number, you can also
put the author’s name and book title (if you’re using the top-aligned
header). Placing the chapter titles in the header is possible but tbh
far more work than it’s worth unless you have a very small number of
chapters because you need to make an additional master page for
every chapter.

Currently the provided template has only the page numbers, with
options for the two most common locations.

You can modify the font, size and style of those page numbers using
the Style -> Page Numbers -> Edit option, as described above. Try to
keep your page numbers the size of the body text or smaller. Don’t
introduce too many fonts into your project - a page with 5 fonts looks
disorganized as hell - so try to keep it to your body font, your chapter
font or a similar looking font.

If you want to switch from the bottom-centered page numbers to the

top-aligned page numbers, right click on the first chapter page and
click Apply Master Pages. In the window that pops up, select
TopPageNum_Right, and apply it to odd pages from 5-8. Click Okay.
Then right click and apply Apply Master Pages again. This time apply
TopPageNum_Left to even pages from 5-8.

If you want to add text or edit the spacing of the page numbers, you’ll
need to edit the Master Page. Go to Edit->Master Pages and then
select the page template you want to edit. I’ll edit TopPageNum_Left
as an example.

You’ll see the page number is represented by a # in the template. If

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 You’ll see the page number is represented by a # in the template. If
you click once on the text box with the # symbol you can adjust the
location using your arrow keys or by clicking and dragging. If you
double click you can type text into the window.

If you highlight the text or a selection of text in the window and right
click, you can select Properties (at the very bottom of the list). From
here you can change the text to a different style or override the fonts
from your styles. I wouldn’t generally recommend doing that, but
you’re only going to be using a small number of template pages so
follow your heart.

You can then exit this window by closing the Edit Master Pages pop-
up.

Here are a few examples of page number stylings, to inspire you, or

possibly strike fear into your heart and show you what to avoid.
(Zoom into 150% zoom to see these clearly)

Default TopLeft and TopRight page numbers, but using the font Lora in Bold
:
 TopLeft and TopRight, with the Author Name and Book Title added, and switched to the font
Creator Credits in Italic (for a more sci-fi feel)

BottomLeft and BottomRight, with the book number framed by ornaments from the
Bergamot Ornaments font. Remember how I said you almost never need to change vertical
alignment back in the styles section? The one time you do is for lining up characters from
different fonts - here I had to go into the text properties->advanced settings and change the
alignment of the number so it matched the centerline of the little leaf ornaments.

BottomLeft and BottomRight, with the word Page before the page number and the font
changed to Copperplate Gothic.

If you chose to put page numbers at the top of the page, the
professional thing to do is to swap them to a bottom centered page
number for the chapter start pages. So if you want to use top page
numbers, make sure the bottom page numbers are styled to match.
(unless you don’t care about this rule, rules are mostly fake, do
whatever you want with your book)

You can demo this by right clicking on the first page of the chapter,
and then Apply Master Page “TopPageNum_Right” to the Current
Page.

Customizing Opening/Closing Section

Remember to print a test before deciding you’re done
customizing the stylization

Step Two: Preparing Your Text

We’re going to import our text into Scribus from an HTML document.
This is the easiest way to preserve any bold/italic formatting as well
as set up the chapter headings in advance.

Download the Document from AO3

:
 First, download your complete document from AO3 in HTML format.
While you’re still on the page, note if there are "Straight Quotes" and
hyphens you want to correct.

According to most style guides:

● Curly quotes should always be used in printed books
instead of smart quotes (“” instead of "")
● A similar rule holds for single quotes. When surrounding
quotes, generally quotes within quotes, the curly version is
used instead of the straight version. (‘’ instead of '') The right
single quote aka apostrophe ’ is also used in contractions like
won’t, abbreviations like ’96 and contractions like ’em.
● Hyphens and em dashes: a hyphen is used to hyphenate
compound words and with some compound modifiers before
nouns (aka time-unstuck adventurer or single-word modifier).
Dashes are longer than hyphens and are what are used—in
digressions such as this—to divide a sentence. I also use
them to indicate dialogue that gets cut off, such as “Wait! I’m
not allowed to—”

If the author wrote on their phone or in a text editor (as opposed to a

smarter “word processor”) these mistakes will be present in the final
work unless you correct them. Whether you bother is entirely up to
you.

While you have the fic open on AO3, also skim through and note if
the author consistently uses the same symbol/notation to indicate
scene breaks. Common ones are horizontal rules or strings of ---- or
**** symbols.

Example from my own fic, with straight quotes (both double and single quotes)

Preparing the Text

Next, open the document in a word processor, such as LibreOffice or
Microsoft Word. Open up beside it a plain text editor, like Notepad.
I’m using Geany. In the text editor write headers for the following
sections:
Metadata
Summary
Opening Notes
Chapter 1 End Notes
Chapter 2 Summary Notes
:
 Chapter 2 Summary Notes
Chapter 2 Notes
Chapter 2 End Notes
etc

(Note: your document might look weird in Word. Don’t mess with the
formatting. Just keep saving it as a HTML document - Scribus is only
going to look at the HTML tags, not how Word displayed them)

Go through your document, cutting all the notes, summaries and

metadata out and pasting them into your plain text document.

When you reach a Chapter Title, add a line before it for the Chapter
Number if that’s the way you’ve decided to style your chapter starts.
Make sure you use the Header 2 style that it’s using for the Chapter
Title.

Before -> After

Before -> After

If, as you go through, you spot grey horizontal lines before/after the
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 If, as you go through, you spot grey horizontal lines before/after the
chapters, go ahead and park your cursor on the line before that grey
line and hit delete until they go away. (not the scene breaks, see
example below) You may also see some comments as you go
through - delete those too.

Make sure you save your notes document. You can close it for now.

Correcting White Space

Demo document in word processor Demo document HTML, open in text e

Geany

Open your document in a text editor (such as notepad or notepad++,

I’m using Geany) and open the find/replace window:

Remove
nonbreaking
spaces
Search for:
 
Replace
with:
SPACE
Do so for
the whole
document
:
 Remove
indentations
at the start
of
paragraphs
Search for:
<p>TAB
Replace
with:
<p>
Do so for
the whole
document

If your document might have tabs in place of regular spaces Replace

tabs with
spaces
Search for:
TAB
Replace
with:
SPACE
Do so for
the whole
document
Remove
duplicate
spaces
Search for:
SPACE{2,}
Replace
with:
SPACE
Enable use
of regular
expressions.
Do so for
the whole
document
Selectively
remove line
breaks
:
 Search for:
<br>
Check each
instance,
either
remove
<br> (if a
line break is
not needed)
or replace
with
paragraph
tags
Then search
for:
</br>
And do the
same thing

When I did this demo, I ended up with a number of <p>> tags at the
end - if you see anything like that find/replace <p>> to <p>. Also
replace > (whole words only) with nothing, if you see any errant >
tags.

Make Scene Breaks Consistent

Check back with your design & see how you wanted to indicate
scene breaks. I’ll use X to indicate your chosen scene break - it
might be a alphanumeric character that in an ornament font renders
as your chosen scene break, a character string like ***, or a
placeholder like * that you’ll use to mark where to place images.

Now, open your html document in a text editor (notepad etc).

Check your document to see how scene breaks are currently

indicated. If they’re indicated using a horizontal rule:
● Find/replace <hr> (or <hr/>, whichever is used in your
document) with <h3>X</h3>
If they’re indicated via text string Z:
● Find/replace <p>Z</p> with <h3>X</h3>

Now search for <h3>X</h3>, checking that a consistent amount of

<p> </p> appear above and below each scene break. 1 is good, 2 is
okay, more than that is excessive.

Note: If you want an ornament after your chapter breaks, now is a

great time to add it. Search through your document for <h2> tags
and add a line of <h3>Y</h3>, where Y is the character you need to
display your chapter title ornament.
:
 Optional: If you want to correct quotes
To correct quotes, open your HTML document in a word
processor:

Instructions using Word

● Open Find and Replace

● Enter " in both the Find & Replace boxes
● Select Replace All
● Enter ' in both the Find & Replace boxes
● Select Replace All

Instructions using LibreOffice

Libreoffice is a PAIN in the BUTT with doing this - it’ll only let you
autocorrect text in the “Default” font style, which means we have to
go one chapter at a time.
● Open Format->Autocorrect->Autocorrect Options
● Under the “Options” tab, uncheck everything from the “M”
column that you don’t want corrected in the document. (I
unchecked everything).
● Under the “Localized Options” tab, make sure the replace
single and replace double quotes boxes are checked.
● Click okay

Now, one chapter at a time:

● Highlight all the text in the chapter (not the chapter title)
● In the styles dropdown, switch the text to Default Style.
:
 ● In the styles dropdown, switch the text to Default Style.
● Apply autocorrect via Format->Autocorrect->Apply
● In the styles dropdown, switch the text back to Text Body

If you have to correct quote marks, there’s a serious risk you’ll end
up with some errant misdirected “” or ‘’ in the final document. It gets
tripped up on abbreviations (’96, ’em), and some quotes-within-
quotes. Autocorrect is smart but not that smart. Plan to proofread
your document before printing, but you should be doing that anyway.

Note: if you used Libreoffice to correct this, now all your scene
breaks don’t have their proper formatting anymore. Sorry! Open it
back up in the text editor, copy one of the scene breaks &
find/replace for <h3>X</h3> again, where X is your intended scene
break symbol.

Optional: If you want to correct hyphens

Look, I’m sorry. There is really no good way to systematically correct
only the hyphens that should be dashes. The best you can do is to
find and replace all “ - “ with —, then “ -” with —, then “- “ with —.
Instances with spaces will almost always be locations there should
have been an em dash. Then replace all -- with —. Some folks tend
to do a double hyphen because autocorrect will (sometimes) correct
that to an em dash.

And then finally you are left with no option but to find and replace -
with —. Look at each instance and decide if it should be a hyphen or
a dash, then replace if necessary. This sucks and I will not judge you
if you decide to skip it.

Making the Opening/Closing Sections

Opening

Before a book actually starts, there’s usually some front matter

pages. These can include copyright information, a splash page with
the title, possibly illustrations, lists of works in the same series, a
dedication page or a dramatic quotation...I once again recommend
pulling a few favorite books from your shelves and checking how
they do it.

Here’s a few example sequences from books I had on hand:

The Thief by Megan Inkspell by Cornelia Gideon the Ninth by

Whalen Turner: Funke Tamsyn Muir
- Dramatic - Splash page - Splash page
Quotation with just title with just title
- - Blank Page - Blank page
Copyright/Printing - Splash page (with gritty ink
:
 Copyright/Printing - Splash page (with gritty ink
information with title, author splashed texture)
- Dedication name, and - Splash page
- Blank Page translation with title, author
- Start of first information name and
chapter - publisher
Copyright/printing -
information Copyright/printing
- Quotation information
- Blank Page - Dedication
- Dedication - Blank page
- Table of - Dramatis
contents (3 Personae (3
pages) pages)
- Map - Blank page
- Cast of - In universe
characters (4 poem
pages) - Blank page
- Blank page - Splash page for
- Start of first the first Act
chapter

Open your HTML document in your word processor and add in any
text you want in the opening section. Don’t add images or page
breaks at this time. You’ll want an appropriate number of opening
pages that the first page of the first chapter is on the right hand side,
but don’t worry about this too much - you can always add an
additional blank page.

If you need any information from your Notes/Summaries document,

now is the time to open it up.

I love to format my AO3 metadata tags on a page that resembles the

printing information / copyright page in a standard book. Here’s an
example for your amusement:

Disaster Gladiators was originally posted on Archive of Our Own on January 18, 2018.
is a fanwork in the Transformers IDW Generation 1 continuity. It was published under
the pseudonym Not_Whelmed_Yet.

The original posting was rated for Teen and Up Audiences

The original posting used the following tags: Functionist Universe (Transformers),
Alternate Universe - Gladiators, Cage Fights, Canon-Typical Violence, suicide
ideation, Ensemble Cast, Empurata, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Trauma, Torture,
Romance, Action,Kissing, a surprising amount of kissing

The original posting tagged the following relationships: Cyclonus/Tailgate/Whirl,

Cyclonus/Whirl, Cyclonus/Tailgate

The original posting tagged the following characters: Whirl, Cyclonus, Tailgate, Orion
:
 The original posting tagged the following characters: Whirl, Cyclonus, Tailgate, Orion
Pax, Original Alien Character(s)

This document is typeset in Raleway (decorative elements) and Lora (body text) and
was formatted and printed in June 2020. This is the first and only bound copy of the
work.

Closing
ArmoredSuperHeavy recommends including work summaries and
notes in an appendix in the final pages of the book, for archival
purposes. You may also want to include a selection of comments
from the AO3 page. When I bind my own writing for myself, I don’t
feel the need to include those notes, but you may wish to.

Other things that are sometimes included at the end of a book: an

essay of acknowledgements, list of works in the same series,
endorsements of the book, a preview of a sequel or other book by
the same author, an “About the Author” page, a closing illustration,
etc.

Follow your heart in preparing the closing section. Now is also a

great time to do any bold, italic or header formatting of the appendix.
Use the same header style as you did for the chapter titles
(corresponds to <h1></h1>) or the header 2 style. Don’t use Header
3, we’re borrowing that for formatting scene breaks. Don’t bother to
add any other formatting, it won’t be saved in the HTML formatting
and Scribus won’t know about it.

Breaking the Document Into Sections

If your document is >50,000 words, you may find that Scribus
lags/freezes while you’re processing the text. I haven’t run into this
problem myself, but if you do, the solution is simple enough: split
your text into 2-4 documents (preferably at chapter breaks) and
import them into separate Scribus documents. You’ll have to go
through the “Importing the Text” instructions separately for each
section, but we’ll fix the page numbers at the end so it all lines up.

Step Three: Applying Styles to Your

Text & Finalizing Formatting

Importing the Text into Scribus

Open your styled template document. Save a copy for this
document. Now, right click into the first text frame and select
contents->clear. (scribus will ask you to confirm this is what you
want to do, tell it yes.)
:
 If you changed the body text font during your stylization, there’s one
thing we have to do before importing! Go to File->Document Setup-
>Fonts->Font Substitutions. This allows you to select the font that
Scribus will use to format bold and italic text in your HTML document.
The template has it set to Lora Bold and Lora Medium Italic - change
it to match your body text font.
THERE IS NO AUTOMATED WAY TO CORRECT THIS AFTER
IMPORTING, PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ARE HAPPY WITH
YOUR BODY TEXT STYLING & HAVE PRINTED A TEST PAGE
BEFORE PROCEEDING.
:
 Now go to file->import->get text. Select your HTML file with your
text. Make sure the “Importer” is set to HTML files.

Cool, now your text is all in the document. Probably you can’t see the
end of the document because there are more than 11 pages. Go to
Page->insert. Enter an estimate of how many additional pages you
need. Make sure you’re using the master page templates that have
the footers in the correct location.

Keep adding pages until you can see the end of your document.

Applying Styles
Open your Styles window. You’ll see that the HTML importer has
made some styles for the different kinds of text that were in your
document. We’re going to ruthlessly take advantage of that.

Select HTML_h1 and delete it. Scribus will ask what style you want
to replace it with: replace it with your Titles style. Click Apply->Done
to exit the menu.

Select HTML_h2 and delete it. Scribus will ask what style you want
to replace it with: replace it with your Chapter Titles style. Click
Apply->Done to exit the menu.

Select HTML_h3 and delete it. Scribus will ask what style you want
to replace it with: replace it with your Ornaments style. Click Apply-
>Done to exit the menu.

Select HTML_default and delete it. Scribus will ask what style you
want to replace it with: replace it with your Default Paragraph style.
Click Apply->Done to exit the menu.

Select HTML_p and delete it. Scribus will ask what style you want to
replace it with: replace it with your Default Paragraph style. Click
Apply->Done to exit the menu.
:
 Now most of the text will be in your prepared styles. Right click into
the text window and open up the properties window, then drag it off
to the side so you can see the document. I often zoom out when
doing this. Scroll through the document and select text and apply
styles. This is where I:
● Switch the “copyright” page to the Ephemera style
● Switch the first paragraph of chapters/scenes to the chapter
start style

Take this opportunity to add page breaks: click before the point
where you want the page break to be, hit “enter” and then Insert-
>Break->Frame Break. (If you don’t put a newline before the break,
the justification in the line above will streeeeeeetch out to fill the
page. You can always solve that problem by clicking and hitting
enter)

This is also a good chance to skim for typos, errant quotation marks
in the wrong direction etc.
:
 Perfecting Justification
Scribus does a pretty good job with justification by default. But you
may notice some places in your document where there’s excessive
white space. There are some techniques you can use to let Scribus
even those out:
● Hyphenation: Most books use hyphenation to reduce
spacing gaps while justifying. You can apply hyphenation to
the entire document (or a selection) by first selecting your text
and then selecting Extras->Hyphenate Text.
○ If your document uses a lot of non-standard words
(I, for instance, write Transformers fanfiction) Scribus
may try to split names and other terms you don’t want
justified.
○ You can correct this after the fact by scrolling
through your document & highlighting any terms that
shouldn’t have been split, then going to Extras-
>Dehyphenate Text
○

○ If hyphenation greatly reduced the readability, first

highlight all the text and dehyphenate all of it. Then
either selectively hyphenate only the paragraphs with
the biggest spacing issues, or adjust your justification
settings to reduce the issues you saw.
○ Hyphenation settings can be accessed from
Document Setup->Hyphenator. Words that should
never be split should be added to the Ignore List. You
can select the minimum length of words to be
:
 can select the minimum length of words to be
hyphenated and the number of consecutive hyphens
allowed. (I have it at 1, because I think having 2
hyphens in a row is hard to read)
●

If you want to do even more fine adjustments of justification (I know, I

know, I’m a perfectionist, sue me), it’s time to open the properties
window and skim through your document. When you find a
paragraph that has excessive white space, consider these strategies:
● If your text isn’t hyphenated, consider hyphenation for this
paragraph
● If you’re the author you can just reword the sentence XD
● In the “Advanced Settings” of the text section, use the
“Word Tracking” option to reduce the size of spaces between
words. You can bring this down to 70-80%, sometimes it’ll
help. Other times it does nothing & you just have to live with a
little white space.
● The other reason to use the advanced settings is to try and
squish text a little is when you have a partial line on a new
page and you’d like to squeeze it in with the rest of the
paragraph. I never have any luck fixing these, but maybe you
will.
:
 Vertical Alignment
You may have noticed in the template, I had a number of text frames
that were only partial height, which allowed the text within them to be
centered/aligned with the three quarter mark.

Depending on where your intro pages fell, you may want to put those
text frames back to standard size. Click on the frame and then click
and drag on the top of the frame to resize it. You can make frames
smaller using the same technique - click on the frame, then click and
drag the top margin to reduce the height.

If you want to make several frames all aligned to the same height, I’d
use a guide on top of your master page. For instance, you may want
all the chapters to begin part of the way down the page. Do this by
going to Edit->Master Page, then selecting the master page applied
to the pages you’re planning to edit (you may need to do this twice,
once for the left and once for the right). Click on the ruler at the top of
the page and drag down to create a guide. As you adjust the location
of the guide, the distance from the top of the page will display. You
can do a little math to figure out the center or the ¾ mark.

Save your master page(s) and then close that edit window.
:
 Now you have very annoying but helpful guides to help you line up
your frames. Once you’re done, you can either go back into the
master pages and remove the guides or just go to View and uncheck
“Guides”. (If you add in a guide and don’t see anything, double check
it’s enabled in the view window)

Adding Images
Okay, hopefully now all your pages are where they’re going to be.
You’ve added page breaks where you need them (your first chapter
starts on the right hand side, right?), you’ve got the justification
settled, you’ve done any frame resizing. If you plan to add images,
now is the time.

Follow the instructions in the Working With Images section above,

demo below

Adding an image frame, adding an image to the frame and adjusting the size of the
image to fit within the frame
:
 Using the Align and Distribute menu to center the image vertically and horizontally.

Fixing Page Numbers

You decide which pages show page numbers and how they’re
formatted by use of master pages (aka page templates). These can
be applied to any page or a range of pages via right clicking and
selecting “apply master page”. Master pages can be edited or new
ones added by going to Edit->Master Pages in the menu. See more
info in the Customizing Headers/Footers section of the guide.

You can also dictate how the pages are numbered. In a standard
book, only the text pages (from the first page of the prologue or first
chapter, until the end of the text) are numbered.

Go to File->Document Setup->Sections. Here you can break the

document into sections, describe the range of these sections,
change the style of page numbers shown (1,2,3 or a,b,c, or i,ii,iii etc)
and pick what number the section starts with.
:
 In this example I have four pages of front matter, which should not be
numbered. My text pages start on page “5”, which scribus will
helpfully show as page 1. My appendix pages I’m displaying as
i,ii,iii,iv etc and start on page 51.

This tool will also be useful if you’ve broken your text into multiple
documents. Once you’ve gotten all the sections laid out in their
separate documents, correct the page numbering as described
above for the first document. Note the last numbered page and what
side it falls on (right or left).

Now for the next document, make sure you begin on the opposite
page side (left or right). This is selected via the File->Document
Setup->Document->”First Page Is” selector. Make sure your
templates are applied appropriately for the left/right pages.
:
 Then go into the Sections window and change the “starts at” for the
second document to be the one more than the final page of the first
document.

Extra Fancy Appendices

If you’d like to have extra fancy appendix page numbering (for
example: Appendix A : Page i, or Page A1) you’ll have to create
master pages for your appendixes.

This is easy enough to do - make a copy of your master page(s)

you’ve used for your text page numbers and add whatever additional
text/prefixes you want. Then apply the new templates to the
appendix pages.

Example: The opening pages are all un-numbered, but the first page of the
prelude/first chapter starts with 1
:
 Example - fancy appendix page numbering via page templates that include the
appendix prefix

Step Three: Exporting & Printing

using Bookbinder 3.0

Exporting the PDF

To export your Scribus document to a PDF for printing, go to File-
>Export->Save as PDF

A window will pop up called “Preflight-Verifier” that shows any errors

with the document - text that doesn’t display fully because your text
frames are too small, characters like emoji that aren’t included in
fonts you’re using, any images that are insufficiently high resolution
to print well, etc. Scroll through this window for any flagged errors &
see if they’re fixable/worth fixing. Otherwise you can click Ignore
Errors to continue.

This will get you to the Save as PDF window. There are a few things
we need to check here:
1. (obviously) Name your file
2. I don’t touch anything under “general” and it comes out fine
- make sure you’re using the maximum compression quality
3. Switch to the fonts tab and make sure every font you used
in the document is either embedded or outlined. Some fonts
cannot be embedded, but any font can be outlined. Outlining
will make your pdf smaller than embedding, but may make
fonts different at very small sizes (I got mixed messages on
this, if you’re a typography expert who can explain
:
 this, if you’re a typography expert who can explain
embedding/outlining to me please reach out).

Hit save - now you’ve got a PDF. Before preceding, check your
document for errors, correct & export again if necessary.

I swear typos become 1000% more visible in pdf files, likely via
witchcraft.

Merging Sections if you Split the Document

If you have multiple documents, next you have to merge your
documents. You might have access to an adobe pdf editor you can
use to do this step. Otherwise, you might install a program like
PDFSam or PDFArranger to do this same task.

OR you could be like me and just google “Merge PDF” and use one
of the free online tools to merge your documents whenever this task
comes up, forever procrastinating on the day when I will install a
program that does this. Whatever works for you. Just make sure you
merge the documents in the correct order (check for errors after you
do this, especially if you’re using a random pdf merge webpage).

Using Bookbinder 3.0

Now it’s Bookbinder’s time to shine. You can find the manual for
Bookbinder here, but I’ll explain briefly the information you need.

Open Bookbinder

Click “File” in the top left corner and select your PDF document via
(Open input PDF)

Under “Printer” select your paper size (Letter). If you’re printing this
duplex (I hope you’re not planning to manually duplex a book) switch
Printer Type to Duplex and uncheck “Alternate Page Rotation”
:
 Don’t do anything under Units, Book Size or Flyleaf section

Now, onto your signatures: Bookbinder by default uses 8 sheet

signatures. For bookbinding, I prefer 4-6 sheet signatures, so I go to
the “Custom Signatures” section.

I’ll give some examples here:

A 72 page 18 is divisible by
document has 6 so I’d probably
18 sheets do 3 6-sheet
(72/4) signatures

A 207 page 52 is divisible by

document has 4 so I’d probably
52 sheets do 13 4-sheet
signatures

You could also

do 8 6-sheet
signatures
followed by 1 4-
sheet signature
A 265 page 67 isn’t divisible
document has by 4,5, or 6 so
67 sheets I’d do
11 5-sheet
signatures
Followed by 2 6-
sheet signatures
Or
16 4-sheet
signatures
Followed by 1 3-
sheet signature

You can use odd or even numbers of sheets in your signatures and
you can always add an odd signature at the end if it doesn’t divide
evenly by the signature size you want.

When you’re ready, click Generate Document. Bookbinder will make

a folder for your document that contains each signature as a
separate file for you to print. (This sounds like a pain but is very
convenient if you’re mooching off a family member’s printer and don’t
want to, say, print all 200 sheets at once and have them yell at you. It
also helps you gather up your signatures separately as they come
out of the printer for folding & punching)
:
 Make sure you check whether the PDF flips on the long or short
edge and set your printer appropriately.

And now you’re ready to bind your

book!
In the unlikely event you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Let me
know if you ran into any issues or found any cool and convenient
shortcuts!

Resources For Bookbinding

See the Bookbinding Resources Masterpost that
ArmoredSuperHeavy has put together as an appendix to their
bookbinding guide

But also while I have you here might I promote my favorite set of
bookbinding instructional videos - the Sage Reynolds videos. They’re
older videos and out of order on his youtube, but they’re so good
y’all. Here they are, in order:
Glue basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuoldYdzzzE
Sewing Signatures pt 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=8gc9wnUCfIk
Sewing Signatures pt 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=556AnIdBFyU
Tipping On Endpapers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=vB5xsWS98BQ
Lining the Spine pt 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=9spV9n6N_mw
Lining the Spine pt 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=BL7CaBLUKRM
Making Headbands & Rounding the Spine:
:
 Making Headbands & Rounding the Spine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtdhVncAPZw
Making a Case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=xI0pcRd_qdw
Making a Case pt 2 & Casing In:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glbe_fDpCiU
(Optional): String Filled Case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmoPcSFBYPY
(Optional): Making an Inset Board:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRlWRP4g_O8

Also useful: advice for trimming in case you plan to trim your book
and lack for useful book trimming equipment:
https://bigjumppress.blog/2013/10/02/how-to-trim-sections-to-
size-without-a-cutter/
: