[Scribus] Initial impressions: Scribus-Aqua

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 01:19 -0500, Kevin Walzer wrote:

> 1. I could not export graphics in PDF. Text exported fine, but graphics
> were blank. It was an easy workaround to print a Postscript file and
> convert to PDF manually, but Scribus' PDF export is one of its biggest
> selling points. Is this an issue with 1.3 CVS, or a Mac bug?

It'm fairly certain it'll be a mac or Scribus/Aqua bug.

> 2. Scribus-Aqua saw only a handful of my Mac fonts even when I added the
> font paths manually in preferences. I'm aware there are probably some
> issues with translating font searches from X11 to Aqua, but I thought Qt
> could handle this stuff more gracefully.

Scribus doesn't use Qt for it's own font handling, it uses freetype
directly. It needs to do this because it needs to do trickier things
with fonts than Qt is capable of.

Freetype can actually load mac fonts, even resource-based ones, if
compiled for it. However Scribus needs to know what kind of font it is
when loading it, and I can't get this information from freetype or
fontconfig. Scribus has always just done file extension comparisons, but
that's far from ideal and won't work at all well on a mac.

Suggestions appreciated.

> This isn't a complaint so much
> as a query to see if anyone might have ideas for workarounds: would
> replacing TrueType fonts with PostScript fonts work better? I just want
> to be able to use more than Luxi Sans and Bitstream Charter in my
> projects. :-)

For now, use `fondu' to convert your Mac fonts to "unix/pc" fonts that
Scribus can work with directly. It's not an ideal solution, but I'm not
sure there's a better one without more support from fontconfig and
freetype or some direct Carbon API coding (mac programming gurus
welcome).

> 1. Are there any scripts/plugins/techniques to generate a table of
> contests based on text styles?

Not really. Craig Bradney has actually been doing a lot of work on this
just recently, though.

> 2. Do template/master pages support automatic page numbering?

I'm pretty sure they do, yes.

> 3. Can text flow automatically across pages (perhaps with an automatic
> text frame setup, which I saw was available in the settings)? i.e. if I
> have a sixty-page poetry manuscript that's been formatted in OO.org,
> will that import gracefully, or will I need to place text on each page
> manually?

If you enable automatic text frames in your doc, it'll flow to the next
page as it's created but new pages will not be created automatically.
That's my understanding anyway - I don't do any long-document work with
Scribus yet.

--
Craig Ringer