Scribus Friendly Print Shops

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Here you can recommend and shortly describe a print shop that has proved to be reliable and Scribus/PDF Friendly.

Please provide a short description of the printer and what they do (sheetfed, litho offset, etc). In particular, if you can find a link to their specifications, please provide it here. It would also be extremely useful to know if they accept PDF/X-3 jobs, CMYK jobs, or both.

The official Scribus documentation, maintained on docs.scribus.net, already includes some Scribus friendly printers.


Important note to future editors:
This list is limited to print shops reported by Scribus users as Scribus/PDF friendly and shouldn't be treated as a cheap place for your ads — they will be removed anyway.


Butz und Bürker, Karlsruhe, Germany

This traditional printshop produces all kinds of prints in black/white and colour, using offset printing machines for higher counts: www.butz-buerker.de

Butz und Bürker produces the members magazine of the local section Ettlingen of the German Alpine Club. Since 2010 I send two DIN-A5 PDFs 1.4 produced by Scribus (4 pages in CMYK for the cover, 40 to 48 pages in B/W for the inner pages) with 3 mm bleeds on all sides. The PDFs are rearranged (and minor bugs in the PDF will be fixed on the fly) and sent to a CTP system to create the printing plates. The printed paper is then cut, folded and bound as a booklet. The final product is flawless.

--Acmh, 22nd July, 2011

Lulu

Read what Scribus users reported on the mailing list:


Short description:
Lulu is an internet based POD (Print On Demand) service, owned by Bob Young (Red Hat) and located in Morrisville, NC, USA.

Pros:

  • No setup costs
  • Can handle PDF produced with Scribus very well
  • Excellent color print quality
  • They will also market your publications for you

Cons:

  • Hard cover is currently limited to 6"x9"
  • Soft cover" isn't like the softcover you'd get at a supermarket — it's thicker than magazine covers, but less than a penguin cover and, reportedly, there are some book oriented organizations which simply will not stock or shelve or whatever, such prints (apparently for this reason).
  • It's worth adding; while LuLu does provide an on-site calculator, pricing on their booklet printing tends to be a little confusing. One factor is the [base price], different for any selected format of book_ add to this a price-per-page cost (considerably different for color or black and white), and these together determine the basic cost for -EACH COPY- of the booklet printed... current example: 50 page, 8.5x11 cost is $5.53 B&W /or/ $12.03 Color.
  • Further possible confusion may arise over what qualifies as a color or black and white book - for instance, an all text booklet would print nicely in black/and/white... but, adding one page with a color photo, this same will be charged as full color printing. By excluding any interior color photo, and adding a color cover, the booklet cost DOES NOT increase over basic black and white price. Again - all this seemed a little confusing to me; and, my review here may otherwise seem a little critical... nonetheless, LuLu is one of the fastest, friendliest, and least expensive on-line PDF print services... is, in fact, the -only- service I could find in U.S. which gives you options of stapled /or/ coil /or/ perfect binding for your booklet from Scribus PDF... very nice... couldn't touch this, cost or quality wise at the local copy shop, so I recommend it :)

The Lulu service is now available in many countries, often with local printing. Once you have a clean PDF it is very good, but there is very little feedback when something goes wrong.

Michael Burbridge, UK

Based in Maidenhead, this printshop does both inkjet and litho work: www.michaelburbridge.com I have used them for several years to print the Taplow Newsletter which is made with Scribus. Like most print-shops they would prefer CMYK, but they do a perfectly good job with RGB originals. I normally send PDF 1.3, but the studio tells me they are happy with PDF X/3.

--A.Findlay 08:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

LightningSource, US + UK

While *friendly* might be a bit of a mis-description, as they don't handhold newbie publishers, LSI will print from a Scribus generated PDF. The key is to ensure the resulting PDF is "PDF/X-1a:2001 compliant". Achieving this can be confusing, as the documentation is scattered, and the guidelines somewhat obtuse and seemingly contradictory to the novice. However, at the time of writing using Scribus-1.5.n (build from svn source) it is possible to generate an PDF/X-1a:2001 compliant file for LSI. Please see here for a more detailed description of the naktiv publishing experience and the references below.

--Richard Foley

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