[Scribus] Publishing a newspaper using Scribus

[Helge Hielscher]

Hello Maciej,

we work on a monthly (or bi-monthly) German-Russian magazine.

On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 01:26:32 +0000, John Poltorak wrote:
> I hope to start producing a weekly 8 page tabloid sized newspaper in a few 
> months time in which there would be numerous articles in multiple 
> languages including English, Polish, Czech, as well as Russian and others 
> and I'd like to get an idea as to how long it would take to put everything 
> together.

Do you have articles translated in multiple languages? That's what take a
lot of time. Especially corrections of the translations often come in
late, destroying hand optimized justified text.
Hopefully the new text system of Scribus 1.3.4 is going to make things
easier.

> I'm thinking about using Scribus, because I'd like to think it will offer 
> a greater chance of automating the production process in the longer term, 
> using articles stored on a text database. I don't know if it can at the 
> moment.

That also depends on what kind of illustrations you have. Can you settle
down to a fixed layout with fixed positions for photos or images? I often
set graphics or images between the texts or alongside at different
positions to avoid boring pages (plus we always have to much for the
available space).

Regarding automatization: there is no external story editor yet. Almost
all editors use Word for text processing, and I have to copy the text
manually to text files. Some are computer literate enough to use
plain text files, but then I often have to fix encoding issues. The
problem with text files is that there is no formatting at all. So right
now I apply formats (bold/underline) by hand. Best would be a text editor
that supports preset styles (and only styles). The main advantages of text
files it that there are tools for it like meld (a diff program).
 
> If this sounds vague, it's probably because I'm not yet totally clear
> about what I'm looking for.

Hope the above helps a bit.

Regards,
Helge