[Scribus] Review of Scribus 1.1.4/1.1.5--mostly positive

[Craig Bradney]

Hi Kevin, and all

<snip>

> http://www.smallbizmac.com/index.php?=entry=/Software/Scribus-in-
> production-setting.txt
> 
> If nothing else, I think this article has some usefulness because I  
> haven't seen anything else written in detail from a professional  
> production/publishing/design perspective about Scribus--most of the  
> commentary is from a more general/non-power-user perspective. So, it's  
> food for thought at the very least. I'd be interested to hear back any  
> comments that folks might have.

A good article with points noted, given you are trying to run it on a
Mac rather than in its native environment.

Some notes (just imo):

1. Import of other (text) formats will happen. Various formats are
planned. It would be preferable at this stage to edit in a WP and
copy/paste or import into story editor/the text frame if you are doing
long text streams. Any typos can be sorted out there too (until we get a
spellchecker up and running).

2. The text will not move in Story editor, nor lose its formatting if
you use Paragraph Styles. At this point the Story Editor does not
support editing of formatted text (ie formatted in the text frames
without styles). It is planned that the Story Editor will be rewritten
to remove this issue and also receive Search & Replace functionality
before 1.2.

3. The Colour editor is on the cards for a rewrite so you can use %s
with CMYK.

4. Speed issues: 1.1.5 is much faster than 1.1.4 having had a good going
over with the profiler. no doubt you have issues with the X11/Qt on Mac
too on that G3 as you mentioned.

5. PDF. Even more improvements in 1.1.5 and CVS. CVS now supports
various image compression methods reducing some exported documents by up
to 90%.

6. Nice comments with regards to the team and development. Thanks. We
really try to keep CVS stable and very usable. Even with the fast growth
of Scribus we see no reason to have an unstable CVS. (Day-to-Day there
might be an issue or two but we try to get bugs killed quickly). This
won't change.

7. I'm not why you used 1.1.4 for this review when you say 1.1.5 was out
already.
1.1.5 has:
CMYK and transparency print preview
Updated transparency/alpha channel code
Extra colour sets
Context sensitive menus
Multiple columns in text frames
Updated controls with inbuilt calculator for placement
Tab support
Text style updates
Updated drawing tools
Search and Replace within Text frames
Text Import/Export in Story editor.
Large performance improvements

...to name just a few from the release notes, which in themselves were a
summary of the Changelog. The requirements for 1.1.5 didnt change from
1.1.4, apart from a decent ghostscript level for the print preview.

1.1.5 was a long development period for Scribus, 7+ weeks since 1.1.4.
Expect 1.2 to be the next official and stable release and to be further
than that away from now even. More tidying up, more features, more
reliability and robustness. Already since 1.1.5 (14th Feb) we have
closed over 30 bugs or feature requests with a few more due in in the
next couple of days. 

I cannot stress how thankful the team is to those who use, test, break,
and report bugs or missing features. It is only through mailing list,
IRC and bug website submissions that we can make sure the issues people
have are sorted out. Of course, articles like yours also give us a good
idea of what reviewers are looking for when aiming their tests at the
"real world".

All the best.

Craig
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