[Scribus] Usability

[Paul Tansom]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:23:53 +0300
"Riku Leino (Tsoots)" <foom at welho.com> wrote:
> Manfred Jung wrote:
> > Would it be possible between the DTP related programs to unify this
> > a bit more. I could imagine it woold help the end users. Well this
> > is only my view and perhaps there are things I overlook. I know this
> > should also be discussed with The Gimp, Sodipodi, Inkscape etc
> > people. But I thought here at Scribus must of us use all of them. So
> > let the discussion begin. 
> 
> Yes there has been some inconsistence in dialog layout even between 
> Scribus' own dialogs. This has been discussed before and there are
> even a couple of bug reports submitted for this at bugs.scribus.net.
> We do have plans to introduce more consistent layout for Scribus with
> the 1.3 development series. Ideas for making the ui better are
> appreciated.
> 
> In my opinion it would be more important to match the "standard" of
> the platform where the application is run rather than the program
> group where it belongs. In Scribus' case even it's not a pure KDE
> application it uses QT and is best run under KDE and KDE users finds
> the look familiar. That's where I think we should take the standard
> for desigining the look, layout and behaviour.

A very quick plea having read the above - please don't tie the
application in too closely to KDE. I have nothing against it in terms of
considering it bad or anything, I just don't like it for my own usage. I
personally prefer Gnome of the two big names, but even that I haven't
used for a long while (my preferences and biases are largely based on
usage back in 2000 I guess, but I have used both on machines much more
recently so I'm not completely outdated!). However, if there
starts to get a heavy requirement in KDE (or Gnome for that matter)
libraries then that will likely cause me problems (in terms of do I
install the libraries or try to find an alternative).

I don't know whether there are that many like myself, but I tend to
ignore software that is too closely linked in with one specific desktop
environment unless it is pretty light weight. As an example, I have
considered trying out Evolution for mail, but on my system (which does
everything I need quite nicely) I would have to install 53 extra
packages and use another 82.1MB of disk space just to get a different
email client (admittedly fairly fully featured). This comes down to the
use of Gnome libraries, etc..

Just to to be sure - I am not having a rant against any desktop
environment here (I use XFCE myself which is definitely growing
itself!), just expressing the hope that Scribus doesn't become too
dependent on large chunks of one or other of them being installed.
Ideally I guess there would be a mutually defined layer between any of
the desktop environments and the application which allowed you to plug
into whichever you happen to use - but that would likely be a massive
undertaking, and technically quite an interesting challenge, not to
mention a certain extra overhead!

Anyhoo, it is definitely a nice application, and I am looking forward to
doing some decent scale DTP with it - can anyone let me have an extra 48
hours each day? :-)

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/