[Scribus] Prefs>Miscellaneous ...

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 10:07:10PM -0500, Louis Desjardins wrote:
> The paths to Prefs are dazzling. It used to be in Settings > Prefs 
> (1.2.x). Now, it's in Edit > Prefs. I'm allright with this. But why 
> changes in Prefs don't reflects in the current document? It confuses 
> me. I didn't figure out that there was a Prefs dialog in the File 
> menu under File > Document Setup... I filed a bug for this. It turned 
> out that there is no bug because of this File > Document Setup 
> thing... But I still find this confusing.
> 
> It confuses me as a user, and also as a translator. There are 2 
> menus, with different names, for basically the same thing.

I've been concerned about this myself. I am inclined to think that the
division is necessary - DTP users *need* document-specific preferences
and settings much more than other app users. However, the current
situation is IMO insufficiently clear. The single best step would in my
view be to just add one line of text at the bottom of the dialogs that
say something like:
	"These settings will only affect the current document"
and
	"These changes will only affect newly created documents"

Imperfect, but then the old situation confused users a lot too ("I
changed this setting, but when I closed the document it went away"). I
don't think we can remove this functionality as it's IMO important
people - thus we just have to mitigate the confusion it causes.

Any other suggestions on how to make it less confusing?

> I will do my homework and get back with something substantial on 
> Hyphenation, Tracking, Widow/Orphan control, Handling of Text. I 
> struggled! The book is not what I can call a difficult task. Only 
> text. Although a little long... But nothing to choke a DTP app. 
> Nothing. Really!

Scribus is weakest with its text handling IMO, with regards to both
functionality and performance. There's work going on to improve both but
it's not fast as the folks doing it only have so much time. More help
is unlikely to hurt.

-- 
Craig Ringer
GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93 380D
	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
	while (! broken) { features ++ ; broken = isBroken(features) }