[Scribus] The layout of books or large documents with Scribus

[Gregory Pittman]

Axel Bojer wrote:
> Axel Bojer skrev:
>   
>> Hello!
>>
>> I am currently struggeling with a book theh I am trying to set up nicely 
>> with Scribus. After having made the switch to Scribus for Broschures and 
>>   a magazine I am now experiencing all kinds of drawbacks with the book 
>> I am working on. In the hope of getting some good tips I am now making 
>> this summary. Perhaps it could be used in the online manual or as a 
>> separate tip page, I have not seen one that goes in depth about this. At 
>> least it would be welcomed if users experiencing--or working--with other 
>> big documents in Scribus could share their experiences.
>>
>> I am aware of some bug reports (of wich I can not remember the numbers) 
>> that adresses some of, or all, the problems I am mentioning.
>>     
>
> Here are some issues I found:
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> 0002438: Metabug: Cases of extreme memory use
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2438
>
> 0004076: large document takes several minutes to load
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4076
>
> 0004328: Severe slowdown in paragraph styles if preview is activated
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4328
>
> 0004024: Get Image Preview too slow for production machines, for 
> magazine/publication etc - doesn't handle big tiffs well
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4024
>
> 0004835: color list on property palette is updated very often
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4835
> (Slows Scribus down. That means it might help to remove all unused colours).
>
> 0004575: Style Manager: Preview tabs
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4575
> (Suggestion for a speed improvment of the style manager)
>
> 0004513: 100% cpu usage while aligning the text
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4513
> (Probably not fixable before 1.3.4. Also mentioned is the slowness of 
> updating when changing the text style)
>
> 0001036: Severe performance problem on documents with very large number 
> of linked frames
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1036
>
>
> It seems like many (or all?) of these problems will be adresse, perhaps 
> even resolved with the coming of the new text system in 1.3.4. Until 
> then, working on big documents with Scribus seems not be be very good 
> *sigh* I do not want to go back to Windows and to Pagemaker, and doing 
> so would render much work already done seemingly useless, so, I will try 
> to force my way through :-/
>
> Is there an easy way to collect two or more finished documents into one? 
> Hopefully without having to edit the resulting file afterwards :-)
> If yes I may give it a try ...
>   
There are ways of combining PDFs to one, with outside software. There is 
also Page > Import from the menu bar in Scribus.

Making a large document or book with Scribus requires a certain mindset, 
keeping in mind that Scribus is a layout program, so you are doing 
layout on a lot of pages. It only seems logical to break up a large work 
into smaller tasks -- chapters, sections, whatever is useful. If you 
were working on a multiauthored text that is surely how it would be 
done. It would also allow for using different tools for different parts.

My wife does some wordprocessing, and I have the hardest time getting 
her to understand why she should use page breaks in the middle of a 
document, instead of using carriage returns to make the next part go to 
a new page. Then she gets frustrated with edits in the middle messing up 
the page breaks!

Greg