[Scribus] slow text editing

[el Sismógrafo , S.L.]

Hi,
I am writing this because there is almost every day somebody on the list 
asking about the speed issue.

I have been considering layouting some pages of our main product with Scribus 
(at the moment we use Quark Express) but there are two reasons that put us 
off the idea after a couple of tryouts. The first reason is the missing of 
character styles (which for a trial go wouldn't have been a major problem) 
and the second and main reason is the extremely slow text editing.
(Of course all text comes in as text files from our article writers).

The typical work of a layouter starts off with a rough text cleaning (white 
spaces, typos, etc.) after which a lot of copy, paste, rearrange, mark-up 
(applying styles) etc. is done. Layouting a complex three page article can 
take even a skilled layouter up to three hours (including the time spend with 
preparing the images) provided that it is _him_ who sets the speed of work 
(and layouter can be mindbogglingly fast...). Layout is often a matter of try 
and error - the faster you try the faster you may discard, the faster you 
will get what you want. If in the process of layouting the program is the 
pace setter, something is wrong.

At the moment we use Scribus for imposing sheets because of its excellent pdf 
support, no real layout work is done with it.

The feature set Scribus has right now is  brillant not to speak of the 
excellent output, the only thing I can think of that's missing is Character 
Styles. For this reason the improvement of speed anounced for the 1.3 should 
get the main attention (I would even say it's worth to get the only 
attention).

P.S. is there a skript repository I can send my skripts to?