[Scribus] grid problems

[Peter Linnell]

On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 10:28, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Hi folks
> 
> I'm trying to use Scribus (1.0) to create a document, and I need a 1 
> inch grid on an A0 landscape page. Having created the document, and 
> turned on 'show guides', I set the units to inches in the preferences, 
> then changed the guides setup to have major grid = 1.0 in, minor grid = 
> 0.1 in, snap to grid=0.1 in. Seems reasonable (well, as reasonable as 
> possible using inches :-P ).
> 
> The guides appeared as a near-solid grid instead. When I then tried to 
> check what they'd been set to, I saw that the measurements were set to 
> '0.01', '0.1' and '0.01' respectively. Strange.
> 
> It actually looks like the grid measurements change for no apparent 
> reason whenever I go into the prefs, even if I change nothing - so long 
> as the unit type is != points.
> 
> Needless to say, this is a strange one.
> 
> If I create a new document with guides (20, 100, 10 pt) ie (minor, 
> major, snap) and switch to mm units, then look at the guides again w/o 
> closing the prefs window, I see (7.06,35.28,3.53)mm . If I close the 
> prefs dialog and immediately reopen it, in the guides I now see (2.49, 
> 12.45, 1.25)mm . Strange, eh?
> 
> It doesn't matter what measurement (so long as it's not pt) or page 
> size/orintation I use, this still happens.
> 
> I'm running Red Hat 9 ( qt 3.1.1 ) .
> 
> BTW, I also found that placing a 216kb PDF, scaled to full page size, 
> onto an A0 page resulted in a 28mb exported PDF from scribus. Strikes me 
> as a bit odd, but I'd have to look into it more to say anything more 
> than 'weird'.
> 
> Craig Ringer

Craig,

Try backing up by renaming your .scribus directory which has all the
preference files. I noticed this once in a while with the 1.0 release
candidates. IIRC, Franz put in a fix for this before 1.0.

The way Scribus imports PDF is to create a high res image of the PDF via
ghostscript. *That* is one of several reasons we recommend the latest
versions of Ghostscript. The latest 7.07 incorporates lots of bugfixes
and works better with the kind of high level PDF and PS Scribus can
generate. Example: With 7.07, I can reimport Scribus created PDF 1.4
with transparency. With 7.05, I would frequently get gs crashes and
errors. 

You can get a RH9 version of GS 7.07 from ftp://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/

This is basically the same as the official RH version, but it re-enables
the shared libgs.so, which enables you to use GsView. I recompiled the
source rpm on three different machines and it works much better than the
RH versions.

I use the KDE 3.1.2 packages from ftp://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/
exclusively in place of RH provided packages. These are more faithful to
the stock KDE than the RH ones and re-enable some very useful things in
KDE like the Kfontinstaller and Kpackage. 

Personally, I've given up the use of RH Qt packages. There are just too
many invasive patches which seems to cause problems with Scribus. Since
compiling my own  Qt 3.1.2, a number of errors and crashes, which Franz
could not duplicate have disappeared. 

Hope that helps,
Peter