[Scribus] what is this

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 17:00 -0800, bart at solozone.com wrote:
> Well, I used to use Quark and my friends still do. That is because
> they use Windows. Quark is very slow to upgrade; they have difficulty
> with a home network which for a while would not recognise another
> instance of itself. They use a mass of extensions supplied by third
> parties usually at around $69 or $129 and THIS ADDS UP. They only
> recently do indexes and tables.

I've been lucky enough to escape needing any 3rd party extensions to
Quark at work... though perhaps I should look into whether there are any
that fix some of its more serious problems.

When it comes to upgrades, I've always found there's also little
incentive to upgrade - they often don't fix serious problems/bugs in new
releases, and the new features are often not very attractive. We're
still on Quark 4.

One of the things I find interesting about Scribus is that (eventually)
it should be quite an accessible task to write plugins and extensions.
I'm very, very interested in seeing where that will lead.

There are also many other lessons to be learned from what the leading
DTP apps did wrong - for example, Scribus has no support for artificial
styles or guessed font names. Thankfully.

I also find the potential to make Scribus much more manageable very
appealing. Support for global defaults (possibly on a network) and
locking preferences so the user cannot change them should both be
practical, though not currently supported. I find configuration
management in my existing DTP systems to be a nightmare, so that would
be absolutely fantastic. The lack of offensive and frustrating copy-
protection on Scribus is also a delight.

> Scribus has matured very fast and has a unique well informed helpful
> community behind it.

> InDesign capitalizes on the difficulties of Quark; that is their
> selling point.

I'd also argue that it capitalizes on long-term frustration with Quark's
high prices and long-lived bugs, as well as their arrogant disinterest
in fixing issues and adding much-needed features anything because of
their market dominance.

> At first InDi did not recognize Adobe's own formats and that was soon
> corrected. But really, you paid $695 for this error?

Only if you bought the first version. That was an unfortunate mess. Now,
it seems to be maturing into a very nice app indeed. Still pricey, but
at least you get a lot for your money. Of course, I haven't used ID as
much, so it could well have its own fair share of horrible quirks and
problems I'm not aware of. Haven't heard anybody mention any yet,
though.

-- 
Craig Ringer