[Scribus] Scientific publishing

[Christoph Schäfer]

Am Mittwoch, 31. Mai 2006 02:33 schrieb avox:
> Christoph Sch?fer wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > following the list for more than two years now, I have recognised that a
> > lot
> > of people use/tried to use Scribus for scientific publishing purposes --
> > with
> > more or less success.
>
> Those people should use LaTeX / LyX instead.
>
> > Although LaTeX can be considered a standard in this
> > area of publishing, there are certainly many goals that can be easier
> > achieved with a layout software.
>
> Only two things come into my mind: posters and combing articles from
> several sources into a proceedings publication.

Actually, LaTeX doesn't suit all the needs of scientific publication. There 
are many situation where careful layout and extensive use of images and 
colours (including colour management) is necessary. Think about biology, some 
branches of medicine or physics, not to mention history of art or zoology.

>
> > In case enough people are interested, I would add a discussion article to
> > the
> > wiki or create a metabug on the bugtracker. I believe the requirements of
> > scientific publishing differ enough from general purposes that such a
> > special
> > would be justified (besides, it could become one area for the suggested
> > expert teams). Things like file formats, bibliographies, scripting
> > capabilities etc. could be discussed there.
> >
> > Please tell me what you think about it.
>
> Sure, but why not discuss it here on the ML? Sounds interesting enough.

Because it's not easy to continue a thread over months and to keep track of 
all postings at the same time.

>
> Here's my take on it:
>
> Scribus should be able to place LaTeX files into specialized textframes.
> Scribus would give LaTeX these textframes as available pages and ask it
> to typeset it. Then Scribus would display the result at the place of the
> frames.

Very good! For all those interested in previous discussions on this issue, 
please read http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=128

>
> At the same time Scribus would change the LaTeX preamble to define Scribus
> fonts, Scribus colors, disable pagestyles and arrange for pages of
> different sizes.
> Page numbering would be modified so it delivers the numbers from the
> Scribus document.

Even better!

>
> LaTeX blibligraphy and index would be another challenge, but surely
> solvable.

The icing on the cake! It would Scribus place ahead of all other comparable 
software.

> I still think authors should *not* use Scribus since a layout application
> distracts
> from the content. 

I don't think anyone would/should use any layout software to create written 
content, but for the final polish it can be a useful tool in a scientist's 
hand. Personally, I'd prefer any scientific book on Rembrandt or hummingbirds 
produced with a DTP program to a LaTeX version ;)

> Posters and proceedings are another matter altogether; 
> or polishing the final layout for a dissertation.

Yes, but a Ph.D. or any other scientific layout has a set of requirements that 
needs to be defined. That's why I suggested a permanent forum either on the 
bt or the wiki.

>
> /Andreas

Cheers,

Christoph