Scribus Friendly Print Shops

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:

• http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-November/013916.html
• http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-November/013917.html
• http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2005-November/013944.html

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)