: Is it possible to have a page with a transparent background? One of my pages has a single image taking up some space on the page. The rest of the space (the space not occupied by the image),

@Samaraweera207

If you really want your printer to print your document on green paper, then you can visualize this with Scribus:

Open your document in Scribus

Click


File > Document Setup > Display > Colors (at tab) > Fill Color


Now in the window, select a color that corresponds to your paper. Now click OK or Apply.

Now - just on your screen - Scribus will show you how the printed result will look.

This is only an approximation, unless your workplace has got a calibrated screen and your printer has provided you with precise detail about his setup and the paper for your order. You can improve the simulation on your screen like this:


File > Document Setup > Color Management > tick Activate Color Management and fill in all the detail that you know about your own system and about the printer.


You also asked this in a comment:


Thanks. According to this, we have the interesting situation that if I
place an order with, say, a green paper, any white in my document will
stay as green. If I tell the printing service that I want white to be
printed (because maybe some of my images have some white), the problem
will be that both the white in the images and the white in the
background will print. How can the printing service distinguish
between white meant to be transparent and white meant to be white? For
that we have another color: transparent. But according to the answers
here, scribus does not have it. Any solution?


No, I do not know an affordable solution: If you opt for green paper (which is exeptional, if you want photos printed on it), then indeed, any white parts of any content (parts of photos) will not receive any ink and will show paper-green.

You can define (pay for) a spot-color and tweak your document to have white ink applied but that would almost re-invent printing. You should rather opt for the classical approach and order white paper and print "green" on any area that you consider to be background. That would turn out cheaper I believe.

You mentioned special, structured, paper. My advise would be to concentrate on finding that quality of paper in white, rather than trying for exotic workflow which will be expensive and potentially frustrating to you and your printer.

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@Tiffany317

For sending a document to be printed, don't use PNG as the export format. There are three reasons for this:


A printing press uses CMYK, and PNG is an RGB-only format.
If your document contains text, that text will be rasterized and will print at the resolution of your PNG (perhaps 300 ppi) instead of the 2800 dpi at which live text or vector information is converted in a RIP.
PNG does not contain a color profile, so not only are RGB > CMYK color changes going to occur, lack of a color profile in the image means that you have no idea what those color changes are likely to be.


Use the Scribus Print PDF workflow instead. Not only will this be a lot easier for your printer to deal with, the output quality will be much higher.

As everyone else has noted, white is transparent on press, so is not something to be concerned about.

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@Rambettina927

As others have noted, white = paper in the print world unless you request it to be otherwise.

When using a specialty stock, it is often useful to have a reference background while designing and during the early in-house proofing process. For this purpose, I create a separate layer below all artwork that contains a scan of the stock or a representative color. Before sending for final proofs, you simply toss this layer.

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@Shelley591

If you are printing in CMYK (which most of the time you will) you will note that there is no 'white ink'. In other words, whatever is white in your file is 'transparent' when it goes to press.

So what is white on your document will be 'the paper'.

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@Correia448

I don't believe that the option exists as print-layout software is focused on laying ink on paper. Since "white" is the absence of ink, it acts as a transparent background.

Keep on mind that unless you are laying a base of ink as a spot color on top of your specialty paper, you will not have any "white" areas in your print. In fact all non-black colors will be darker. You can mock this up by layering a png of your layout with a image of your paper using the multiply blend mode in any decent image editor.

You should ask your printer for a proof if you have any more reservations.

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