On Tuesday 07 September 2010 14:38:43 Tavmjong Bah wrote:
On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 14:22 -0400, John Culleton wrote:
I have three books on Inkscape, the third edition of "Inkscape Guide to a Vector Drawing Program", "The Book of Inkscape" and the smaller "Inkscape for Vector Graphics". None of the three mention the Render tool "Perfect Book Template" which I am reasonably certain came in with version 47 or perhaps earlier. With version 48 the barcode generator choices include two that are useful for book covers, EAN 13 and EAN 5. With these enhancements Inkscape is not yet a complete stand alone book cover tool (no CMYK, no PDF X/1-a) but it is getting close. With a little help from other free software such as Scribus the potential is exciting.
It's called "Perfect-Bound Cover Template":
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Extensions-Render.html #Extensions-Template-PerfectlyBoundCover
OK, it doesn't say a lot but it is mentioned.
EAN 13 and EAN 5 as well as the book cover template were added in 0.46.
You have failed to mention the "Printing Marks" extension which could also be useful, added in 0.47.
I had a request for printing marks at the spine from a user of my e- book. Neither Inkscape nor Scribus offer this refinement but they can be drawn by hand.
I traced down the Perfect Bound Cover extension in your book by looking up its immediate predecessor, the Butterfly Curve, in the index. The PB Cover didn't make it into the index. Also PB cover is mentioned in Chapter 41 of the Floss book but of course that book has no index at all and the description is totally obsolete. Tempus fugit.
If the cover template were to be exported via pdf without any content the spine guides would of course disappear. So a rectangle fitting the spine exactly would need to be fitted to the spine area. If there is a function to convert spine guides to line segments in this instance that would be a bit more accurate.
It probably makes more sense to fill the template with content in Inkscape first, and export it to Scribus just for the missing attributes mentioned before, CMYK color model and possibly PDF X/1-a PDF version.