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

[Andreas Vox]

Tamir Hassan <dev at tamirhassan.com> schrieb am Do., 13. Juni 2019, 11:23:

> 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.
>

Scribus doesn't support automatic float placement, yet. If it did, updating
the floats would probably delayed until the user left the current paragraph
or even left edit mode.

>
> > 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.
>

If you embed the metrics you might as well embed the whole font.

>
> > 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.
>

Wouldn't it be more useful to lock some pages so their layout stays fixed?

If text is always reformatted, there won't be any irritating white space
except at the end of an article.

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).
>

As far as I know, in professional workflows for more graphical applications
designers/authors use the same software, and page ranges are assigned to
individual contributors.
Publishing houses usually enforce a single file format for authors, either
MS Word or a TeX variant.

>
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