Design a book cover with Writer

[ardv]

i’m trying to design a book cover with writer
so i make a file with 3 pages:
the first one and the last one have the height and the width of A5 paper
the second page have the height of A5 page, and the width of that page will change according to the number of pages of the file: it is the thickness of the book
and then i need to print the 3 pages in the same page
but in the printing dialogue there is just the option to print 4 pages or 2 and there is no option to print 3 pages

so i added a 4th page and make its width: 0.1
but when i try to print the 4 pages alongside together there is no option for that, it prints the two first pages in the same line and the other 2 pages in another row.

is there any clue to fulfill that idea?

[ajlittoz]

I think your idea is not the right path. You seem to size your book as a collection of A5 sheets (correct me if I’m wrong). Your cover is then A5 (back side) + binding width + A5 (front side) all on a single sheet of A5 portrait height. You are probably thinking of printing it on a landscape A4

If this is your goal, the flaw is the lack of extra width in A4 to account for the binding width, unless you trim your book pages to something slightly smaller than A5. But even so, you can’t guarantee then the remaining area in landscape A4 is enough for the binding width.

Also I can’t predict the effective width of a book: it depends on paper thickness and pressure during binding (glueing).

You should ask a professional to bind the book and provide him with graphical material for front, back and spine. However the cost is justified only if you need tens of copies.

For only a couple of copies, you can proceed more amateurishly. First bind your book contents with glue. Glue an adequately sized Bristol board around it (A5 height, A4+ width). Glue front and back A5 sheets on it. In the end laminate the final book.

For less “permanent” binding, I use plastic binding rails (available in various sizes) I can cut to fit book dimensions. My cover is printed on standard sheet. I add at top and bottom a transparent plastic sheet. Not very professional but enough for personal work documents.

[ardv]

@ajlittoz

You seem to size your book as a collection of A5 sheets (correct me if I’m wrong). Your cover is then A5 (back side) + binding width + A5 (front side) all on a single sheet of A5 portrait height. You are probably thinking of printing it on a landscape A4

i think to print it on a page bigger than A4, i dont know if i can find it but i think the professional printing companies use them and may be sell them.

@ajlittoz

For less “permanent” binding, I use plastic binding rails (available in various sizes) I can cut to fit book dimensions. My cover is printed on standard sheet. I add at top and bottom a transparent plastic sheet. Not very professional but enough for personal work documents.

i also use these same methods in my personal uses, and mostly i print 2 pages in A4 and as booklet and then bind them manually with making small holes and bind it manually like the stapler does (almost staplers are not taller to bind the A4 in the middle)
but i want now to make something closer to professional for publishing works with a large number of copies, i find that the videos explaining the designing of book covers uses photoshop or inkscape to design the book cover, so i think of doing it in a simpler way with Writer like i described in the topic.

[ajlittoz]

The problem here is a mechanical one. Can your printer accept a non-standard sheet size? Usually this is done through the manual feeder. You insert the sheet in landscape orientation (the “height” occupies the full width of the printer slot). The length can somehow be arbitrary.

You define a custom page style for your sheet size. I’d then use text frames for front and back text material so that they can be repositioned “easily”. The spine is either another frame or a full graphical object.

Graphical material can be designed in Draw (for “simple” elements) or with GIMP, Inkscape or whatever application you’re familiar with. it is then pasted into Writer.

Since a cover is not a full-fledged text-flow document, you can also design everything in Draw (if your back cover is not a sophisticated text needed advanced formatting).

Another possibility is to go for a desktop publishing (DTP) application like Scribus. But you still need to create your graphical elements with another application.

[LeroyG]

@ardv

in the printing dialogue

(NOT a valid solution, see next comment)

[ardv]

thank you. (i did not see it now because i have a black dots near that space in the monitor)

but there is a problem: the middle page is consider as A5, so the width is not the correct one that i need.

[LeroyG]

@ardv

there is a problem

Hmm. I don’t tested with different width pages. Sorry.

[EarnestAl]

You could create a landscape page in writer of a suitable size and divide it into three columns. But writer is not really a drawing tool.
This question uses Draw for the cover, How do I rotate text box and rotate text orientation?
You might want to put in crop marks for there printer to trim the paper. Remember to allow for the thickness of the pages for the spine width. Also allow for the thickness of the cover at the folds

[LeroyG]

I created a document with a Legal size page, 3 mm upper and lower margin (half the 6 mm difference between Legal width and A5 height), and inserted a table with 3 columns: first and third width at 148.5 mm, and the middle one you must adjust; and in the Table tab you must adjust the table width (297 mm + bind width).