[Scribus] More Questions

[Craig Ringer]

> On the newspaper, take your cues from those already available and
> improve upon those things you think could be better.

I'm responsable for a paper that runs on MacOS 9 boxes with QuarkXPress 
4, and I can tell you for sure that that's definitely not problem free. 
Nothing is in IT, especially it seems in prepress/print. Scribus + Linux 
will no doubt be a similar situation (OK, infinitely less crap OS, and 
Scribus is much less "mature" but in many ways nicer than Quark, but 
it'll still break in real world use because everything does.)

My attitude is: Be prepared for problems, leave plenty of time for 
testing, and you should be alright. Hell, /expect/ problems. Never do 
something first time for production use, because if you do it probably 
won't work (just one of those things).

We've currently got Quark crashing whenever we try to print documents 
with placed PDFs - it suddenly started happening on all 6 workstations, 
with most PDFs. *sigh*. Quark support says "we don't know, and why are 
you using that old version <hint hint> anyway". The moral of the story: 
commercial doesn't always better support, since they may have their own 
priorities.

Oh, and make sure you have good quality fonts. There's nothing more 
infuriating to debug than problems caused by dodgy fonts (OK, maybe 
subtle network issues, but it's a close call).

WRT to Scribus - I presume you've used it for a while personally and 
made sure it does what you need, is stable in your environment, etc? If 
so, then cool - have fun :-)

I'm tracking Scribus development, and would love to try it out on an ad 
workstation some time. We've got a significant LTSP deployment, and 
being able to use Scribus on those boxes would rock.

I don't know if you folk have thought about this issue, but the 
combination of Scribus, a seriously grunty server (like our dual xeon 
2.4 with 2 gigs of ram) and LTSP clients has a lot of potential for 
things like ad workstations at newspapers. /Especially/ with the ability 
to import OO.o documents with intact formatting (at least text 
formatting like bold etc, if not tables and such). Even without that, 
though, it's a pretty earth-shaking idea for someone in a (small-ish) 
paper. Need a new workstation? 5 minutes later, the new LTSP box is up 
and running. With 10/100 e/net it'd be easily responsive enough, I use 
the GIMP over remote X on a netbooted P133 regularly. One of the things 
I'm focusing on is testing Scribus over remote X11, and that's the main 
reason.

I'd like to be able to contribute more in terms of testing, docs, etc 
but so far am running in to time issues.

Craig Ringer