[Scribus] Q; Why does import from Inkscape/SVG look so different in Scribus?

[D. R. Evans]

Sorry about the tedious length of this posting. Those who are particularly
bored can either skip to the PPS or ignore me all together.

Gregory Pittman said the following at 06/12/2006 02:13 PM :

> Importing SVGs remains a bit of a work-in-progress, with various 
> features not or poorly implemented. What Scribus version are you using?

1.2.1 (the version that comes with Official Mandriva 2006.0)

>> So I have a very simple question: when I "Import" this into a 6" x 9"
>> Scribus document, it looks completely different than the way it looks when
>> I view it in Inkscape:
>>
>> 1. I can't see the text or the pistol on the screen, just what appear to be
>> bounding boxes for the text.
>>   
> I saved then imported your svg to Scribus 1.3.3.2, and saw the pistol 
> and printed it OK, but it was displaced all the way to the right. 
> Perhaps yours is completely outside the bounding box for the SVG, or 
> hiding behind one of the other frames.

Dunno; it looks fine when I open the file in Inkscape, so doesn't that
sort-of mean that everything is OK? It seems to me like if I were to
change/move anything, it would no longer be right in Inkscape -- not that
that matters, except that I wa susing Inkscape to generate the page.

Maybe I'm bringing the file into Scribus in the wrong way? I'm simply doing
an "Import SVG".

I really want to use Scribus to build the cover (something that was
recommended here a couple of weeks ago when I first asked about using
Scribus to build the entire book -- the basic recommendation seemed to be
"don't use it for the book, but use it for the cover"), but if it's this
tricky even to do a simple SVG with just one figure and one kind of text,
I'm beginning to think that I should be using something like the Gimp
instead (although the thought of building an entire cover with the Gimp
doesn't fill me with delight).

> The text cannot be seen because it's too big for the size of its frame. 

Right, RESET... I'm going to try to go through this step by step. So...

I'm being terribly dense, I'm afraid. What do you mean? Drat! Scribus just
crashed. Hang on...

OK... so I just created a new 6" x 9" document. The SVG file on the web
fits comfortably in a 6" x 9" page (I created in a 6" x 9" Inkscape page).
So I just imported it and dragged it on to the blank page, and when I
released the mouse button, I get the blank bounding boxes. Which frame is
too small? And what in the above process did I do that resulted in a frame
that's too small?

> Enlarging each frame will allow them to appear. If you can, it's 

Which frames exactly? There's a big frame that has a red border, whose size
I can adjust (slightly) before it goes off the page, but that doesn't seem
to make any difference. I don't seem to be able to select the various
bounding boxes individually, so I don't think you mean those.

> recommended that you insert text features in Scribus, rather than 
> putting them in the SVG -- you will get better results anyway. 

I tried that -- in fact, I initially didn't intend to use Inkscape at all,
but I found Scribus to be impossibly terse: the very first thing I did was
to open Scribus and imported the pistol directly from the open clipart
library at openclipart.org. Then I needed to reflect and rotate the pistol,
but spent 15 minutes trying to find a command or any documentation that
would tell me how to do that in Scribus -- and failed :-( That's when I
decided to add the Inkscape step.

Maybe it's just that there's a heap of Scribus documentation somewhere, and
I have yet to find it??

So instead of trying to fix the import from Inkscape, let me back up and
ask a simpler question: where is there Scribus documentation that actually
describes how to use it *in gory, gruesome detail*?

  Doc

PS Sorry, I really am not an idiot, although I'm sure I'm giving a good
impression of one. I just have not the slightest idea how to use any of
this, and I simply cannot find the documentation that lays it all out for
me. I'd be perfectly happy to spend a couple of evenings reading
documentation before touching the keyboard, if only I could find the
documentation.

PPS Ah! I found the icon that allows me to rotate the pistol. Now I just
need to reflect it. I found a "Flip Horizontal" and "Flip Vertical" buttons
under the object Properties, but those buttons can't be pressed :-(