[Scribus] some concerns / making scribus better

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hallo Emanuel,

Am Dienstag, 5. September 2006 02:13 schrieb Emanuel Schwarz:
> Hi All,
>
> Iam the layouter of an local non-profit youth-magazine. In the past i did
> this in Adobe InDesign which i really like. But since iam really
> interrested in open-source now and finally hopped over to the Linux world,
> Scribus took its place.

Welcome to Scribus!

> A week ago i finished the first issue completely in open-source software,
> and what should i say - iam never going back to windows. The first steps
> with Scribus where surprisingly easy, i like the look and feel of it.
> Everything is allmost self-explaining and the workflow nearly hits
> InDesign. Also, like every linux/open-source prog the community seems
> quite nice and willing to help those who are in need.
>
> And to contribute to this great project, at least i could tell you which
> things could be made better, what decreased my workflow or what simply is
> a pain in the neck.
>
> 1.: In the "Property"-Window is always "X, Y, Z" selected after
> deselecting the current object.
> which is very annoying if you have to change many objects of the same kind.
> It would be better if it stays in the menu you leaved it or if you could
> open more than one menus at the same time (Form, Text, Lines,..)

Known issue :(

>
> 2.: When you move or scale an object by clicking the arrows, or use the
> mouse wheel, the value always goes up/down by an whole millimeter (or what
> units youve selected).
> I think it should first make an integer and then goes up/down by an whole
> unit (75.19 mm > should first make 76.00 mm and then 77.00 when you raise
> it stepwise)

I suppose you mean the properties palette?

>
> 3.: I want to paste text directly on the workspace, not to first make an
> textbox and paste it in there.
> it should use the standard font and font size selected.

This is _not_ a good idea. I think we have discussed this issue at least a 
dozen times. Use text frames. Period. It will help you to keep your pages 
structured. That doesn't mean there should be no more advanced features of 
text frame creation. I advise you to check the bug tracker and the archives 
for previous discussions and acknowledged feature requests.

>
> 4.:There should be an right-allignd-justification. (i know this is
> allready mentiond before, but its really important)
>
> 5.: the justification algorithm dont seems to be the best. it should alter
> the distances between letters automatically if i want to.
> right now i have to manually edit it, what really costs time when
> layouting a newspaper.

Can you explain this a bit more detailed, please?

>
> 6.: It might be my computer, but if the layouting document gets big,
> scribus can slow down quite a bit.
> I never had this problem in InDesign, which i thought must be way slower.

I don't know about your computer, but Scribus can significantly slow down with 
large amounts of text in linked frames present.

>
> 7.: when marking the whole text in a textbox its hard to mark the first
> letter. in general its often a problem to mark exactly the letters you
> want.

Known issue, but Scribus has seen heaps of improvements in this area already. 
If you follow the bug tracker and read the road map, you will recognise that 
we can hope for relief soon (at least I hope so ;)  ) Don't forget: the guys 
coding this piece of software are really smart, and they _do_ listen to their 
users ;)

>
> thats it for now, ill posting some more issues if i find them ... or if i
> can remember what should be changed. i hope i could be a little help to
> make scribus a better programm.

I think help like yours is always appreciated. However, it might be helpful to 
rummage the bug tracker for already known issues...

BTW, you have Austrian adress, so you might be interested in supporting the 
project by translating some English Wiki articles into German. Just an 
idea ... :)

> I wait for the moment when scribus is that 
> good that i can forget about my InDesign :)

I don't have an InDesign CS2 copy here, but I had the opportunity to "play" 
with it a bit some time ago. From my impression it is "state of the art" at 
the moment. But Scribus is not so far behind, and in some areas it's already 
better.

Just out of couriosity: Which version of Scribus is it that you use?

>
> wishes / emanuel

Sch?ne Gr??e

Christoph