[Scribus] Tables in Scribus?

[Mardigrafe - Louis Desjardins]

I think that the most important thing is "keep it simple".

The vast majority of the people working in the graphic art industry is still on Mac OS 9 and work with Quark 4 which was a short upgrade of version 3.32 (and who uses the bezier curves in Quark? we use Illustrator and Photoshop for that). A minority went to 5 (and who uses the tables and the web tools?). And how many upgraded to 6 is certainly one of the best kept secret at Quark's headquarters.

All this to say, in my humble opinion, that the Scribus team has to concentrate on getting the product to first achieve the basics for the graphic arts and then interact well with the other programs that can complete the work and not try to do everything (that is already well handled by other programs). After that, yes, a step further towards high-end features such as transparency, tables, etc.

You need math typesetting : use Tex but maybe Scribus could integrate a Tex rendering engine. Quark has one (it's an XTension).

What Quark does right, Scribus should do it too (here are a few) : stability, printability, efficiency, lots of keyboard shortcuts including for text formatting with stylesheet (one stroke on the keypad and not at least 2 like in InDesign) and handle fonts properly.

What's really missing :

- Bleed
- Drop caps
- Point size and leading at least in 10th of a point
- Multicolumn in a text box (but I think this is fixed)
- Keyboard shortcut to apply stylesheet
- Import/Export text at least from/to OpenOffice format (including stylesheets)
- Improve the typesetting engine (user should be allowed to define a few more settings such as in Quark)
- Allow user to define hyphenation exceptions (import/export user defined lists from OpenOffice)
- Pica measurements on base 12 and not in decimals
- Spot colors (but Pantone is proprietary...)
- A find/replace feature with real horse power (this has always been clumsy in Quark) : multiline... and beeing able to save that search/replace table to use it in other documents... would be nice!
- Various typographic spaces (thin, en and em spaces) breakable and non-breakable ... searchable in the find/replace feature
- Ability to define the language of hyphenation on a paragraph basis (or at least on a text box basis)