[Scribus] Envelopes in Scribus [re-sent with shrunken .sla file]

[Gregory Pittman]

This may be something analogous to using your car to drive across the
street instead of walking, but Scribus is quite useful for making envelopes.

The practical problem is that all the various word processors in Linux
are awful with printing envelopes -- they're difficult to figure out how
you are supposed to set them up and often don't work well or at all.

I use a laptop a lot, which in my case also means I am using printers
wherever I can find them -- right now, depending on where I am I may use
(these are all HP printers) a 660C, a photosmart, 4000 TN, P4, P4 plus
or DJ 500. How each feeds envelopes is very different. I went to the
bother of writing a perl program that creates a latex file with the
rotating package and converts to Postscript -- it works better than any
word processor, but requires different program versions for different
printers.

Back to Scribus -- Because of this orientation/envelope feeding problem,
the envelope size feature in Scribus (e.g. COM10E) isn't very useful for
some printers. But Scribus has other features which work very well --
the page guides and the ability to create nonprinting layers. If you
check the attached .sla file, this has been set up for a center-feeding
Laserjet 4000TN. Since I used an envelope with a return address already
on it, it only needs one text frame. The nice thing is being able to
tack a nonprinting note on the page to remind me what it was generated
for -- you could also make this a multiprinter file by telling where the
text frame should go for different printers.

An addition to Scribus, useful for envelopes and other things too, would
be some buttons in Properties to be able to instantly click rotation to
90, 180, and 270 degrees (and back to 0 for that matter). This would
also help editing (until Story Editor gets fixed) since editing is much
easier at 0 degrees than 90 (and an upside down text frame acts really
weird).

Gregory Pittman

[Incidentally, there really is a street called Mylanta Place in
Louisville -- have *no* idea why; either a developer with a sense of
humor or sense of pain in the stomach.]

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