Printing Tools (1)

The Preflight Verifier

“Preflight” is a word borrowed from the process that pilots go through as they check out their plane prior to takeoff. In the context of Scribus, it is meant to describe a check of a document for potential or likely issues in a commercial printing environment. Even though these may not have the life-and-death import of problems that might occur with an aircraft, making mistakes in a document can be financially costly and cause you to look and feel incompetent. Creating a document that will work without issues in a given commercial printing workflow doesn’t require years of academic training. What it does require, though, is some background knowledge, and this Online Help provides at least some of the necessary information. Even better, Scribus comes with a software tool called “Preflight Verifier,” which helps to identify potential problems more easily, and whose warnings you should only ignore if you know that you can safely do so.

The Preflight Verifier can be started from the Menu Bar via Windows > Preflight Verifier. It will also show up automatically, if any errors have been detected when you try to print, to start the Print Preview or to export to PDF, EPS or PostScript:


Via “Current Profile:” you can select the file type of your export/print destination: PostScript (which includes EPS), PDF 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 or X-3. The default profile is the one you selected in the Document Setup or the Preferences (see below). Beneath the profile selector you can see a list of all items in your document. In the first column of the overview, those items for which Scribus didn’t detect any errors will be indicated by a green check mark. Objects with potential errors will be indicated by a warning sign. The second column will show the potential error, and the third column shows the layer, on which the item has been placed, indicated by its color and its name. By selecting an item in this dialog, you also select the item itself, and Scribus will jump to the respective page. After fixing a potential error, you can let the Preflight Verifier check the document again. You can also choose to ignore the warning(s) and print or export anyway.

In many cases, you might consider these to be simple warnings rather than errors in the usual sense. For example, in the dialog above, you may be already aware that Image13 is a GIF and has a low resolution, but you didn’t have any choice about using it as is. Even so, this can serve as a reminder to carefully check that image in your PDF to see if it meets your needs. On the other hand, it’s more likely that either you forgot to delete that empty Image12 or forgot to load an image, and you probably didn’t want text to overflow in the Text9 frame. Certainly in a large document, and despite repetitive manual proofreading, these kinds of mistakes can easily happen.

As almost everything else in Scribus, the Preflight Verifier can be configured via the Document Setup or the Preferences:

Adding your own profile:
Simply use one of the existing profiles, such as PostScript you see below, and change the name. Once you do this, the Add Profile button will become active, so that you can save your profile after you change the settings as you wish. Don't worry, the original PostScript profile will still be there.

The options in this panel are as follows:

The Print Preview

As mentioned in the previous section, one of the challenges of using an advanced DTP application like Scribus is handling “high-level” PostScript output. If you happen to be able to use a real PostScript printer (which won’t be a device that’s as small as your photo printer), you may start to appreciate some of Scribus’s PostScript/printing features. Let’s have a closer look at the Print Preview, which can be called via File > Print Preview.

The Print Preview in Scribus is quite special, as it does more than just generate a screendump of your document. Scribus creates its Print Preview by actually generating and analyzing a temporary PostScript file. Have patience when launching the Print Preview, as there’s a lot of processing going on in the background! It is worth mentioning here that this is one of the functions of Scribus which requires Ghostscript to be installed on your computer.

The Print Preview, in connection with the Preflight Verifier, can help you with identifying potential issues in a file-to-printer PostScript workflow. The reliability and precision of the Print Preview mostly depend on the capabilities of your printing system, including the quality of the device drivers, along with the types of advanced features included in your documents. The types of features which can be troublesome with some printing setups include gradients, transparency and complex masking, to name a few.


Print Previewer

Most options in the Print Preview have been created for advanced PostScript or commercial printing. Thus, most, if not all options in this dialog are probably superfluous if your printing device is a simple desktop printer.

The first set of check boxes deals with “Display Settings” related to printing:

The second set of options relates to previewing a document within the Print Preview. These will be described in the section about the actual printing dialog. The options at the bottom of the dialog should be self-explanatory.