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I want to create a set of designs to print on some CDs. The CDs should have similar design in the sense, that there should be a title, some lines of text and an image. I wanted to create a template version that I would copy for each CD I need to create.

My problem is the cropping of the whole document in non-regular shape (and the hub in the middle). Let me explan a bit. I have a set of images one per CD design. These images are rectangular and or various aspect ratios etc. So I need to adopt to the needs for each CD individually.

I could of course shift the image to the desired location and then adopt the shape of the image frame. However this is quite intensive from the perspective of workload.

I just clicked together a minimal example of the issue with a small image from pixabay: Example image The outlines are on a separate layer and I enabled it to descibe my problem a bit more clearly. In the lower right corner the image overruns the borders (as well as at the hub). I want to make this white in order to avoid wasting ink on these areas while printing (and making a mess in my printer by the way).

So I want everything to be white except for the area beteween the two circles.

Ideally this should be done in scribus as I can see the final result in the preview then. One alternative is loading the exported file into GIMP and put a mask on it. This will work but I thought it might be better done in scribus. Also this should be done automatically as already states as the text and the image(s) must be exchanged to generate a set of different layouts for different CDs.

Can you give me a hint, how I can achive this desired effect? Thank you.

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If I read you question correctly, you have (mostly) already answered it: just create a "CD" shape that you convert to an image frame and where you can load the image.

Here the steps:

  • Draw the two circles
  • Select both circles, go to "Item > (Path tools >) Path Operations", and pick the "Substract" button
  • Item > Convert to > Image frame

Now you can load an image into the frame and use the "Image" tab of the "Window > Properties" palette to scale and move around the image inside of the CD shape. (Scaling is a bit painful, but moving around works also with the mouse: you simply need to double click on the image.)

As far as I can tell, you're already doing that with the text... but when I think of my huge CD collection, I would avoid doing that and rather put text frames on top of the CD shape. (Most of the time with straight borders, sometimes with carefully shaped borders... but i would not blindly follow the CD shape.)
But you can also have two CD shapes one on top of the other; one with a visible border, one without.

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  • The trick was the double click. I was not aware of this trick. Instead I typically scaled to frame size and then cut the frame. This is much easier.
    – Christian Wolf
    Commented Oct 2, 2019 at 15:27
  • What do you mean by putting text framed on top of the CD shape? The text is on its own layer within a normal text frame (shape adopted to the CD shape).So we might just talkign of different things....
    – Christian Wolf
    Commented Oct 2, 2019 at 15:32
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    No we are talking about the same thing : - ) From the screenshot I could not tell, that the text is on a different layer. You can adapt the text frame to the shape (probably the best idea in this case) or convert a shape in a text frame (useful in same rare cases).
    – a.l.e
    Commented Oct 2, 2019 at 15:57

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