[scribus-dev] Fwd: Great meeting you in Saarbrücken

[Tamir Hassan]

Hi Andreas,

On 6/13/19 10:36 AM, Andreas Vox wrote:
>     Combining this with interactive, WYSIWYG editing is a different
>     problem,
>     as everything would be jumping about from page to page every time a
>     single character is typed, assuming the computation can be done fast
>     enough.
> 
> 
> Scribus already does it that way.

I am not that familiar with Scribus, but I was talking about float 
placement and other global optimizations. Even LaTeX only uses a greedy, 
list-based algorithm for this.

> Substituting the font without reflow usually makes the document useless 
> for professional use. Scribus allows editing with substituted fonts and 
> changes them back when they become available, but text layout is always 
> done with the substituted font's metrics.
> Editing a document without having the used fonts available is always 
> suboptimal and should not be encouraged. Permanently substituting 
> missing fonts with an available one is the better choice unless you have 
> a workflow where users have  different font sets and the final layout is 
> done by someone who has all the fonts.

Yes, that's what I was getting at. Working on a document e.g. in a 
corporate setting with licensed corporate fonts, but together with 
people from outside of the company. You could send them the document 
with embedded metrics and they will be able to edit it using a 
substitute font, and when they return it to you the typesetting will be 
flawless again.

> Speaking of workflows: what kind of workflow do you want to support with 
> editable PDF? Touching up a document at the print shop? Providing 
> collaboration between authors who use different page layout 
> applications? Allowing to reuse an existing PDF later for a new project?
> To me, avoiding reflow only makes sense for the first of those.

I don't agree. My background is in research and I have often worked on 
papers and grant applications together with other researchers. Such 
documents often contain many figures and tables, which are often 
floating (that's a nice optimization problem here).

Anyway, as the document is authored and the text gradually gets closer 
to the final version, the layout also starts to take shape, and I have 
always edited text hand-in-hand with the layout. If I were to send the 
document to a colleague to e.g. edit section 3 of the paper, it would be 
irritating if it would come back with sections 1-2 reformatted and lots 
of whitespace where the text did not quite fit its allocated space.

I can only imagine that, for more graphical publications, such as 
textbooks in e.g. education and magazines, this becomes even more 
important. The current workflow where the author only uses a word 
processor and sends files back and forth to a graphic designer is not 
very efficient; it would be much better if both could edit the same 
document (simultaneously, even).

Best,
Tamir


-- 
Dr. Tamir Hassan
Round-Trip PDF Solutions
Research, development and consulting for the generation, analysis and 
data extraction from PDF documents

Zirkusgasse 31, 1020 Wien, Austria
www.roundtrippdf.com
tamir at tamirhassan.com
+43 676 721 6288