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

[Axel Bojer]

Dan Fink skrev:
> I'm currently about 80% through building the layout of a 250+ page book
> with Scribus, and it includes over 300 photos and CAD drawings. And I'm
> using a old, slow Linux machine with not a whole lot of RAM. 
> 
> Simply keeping each chapter as a separate .SLA file is working just fine
> for me and eliminates all performance issues. I just assemble the PDFs
> from each chapter into one giant PDF file with Acrobat when printing
> needs to be done, and it's working great (so far).
> 
> DAN

Yes, this might be an option for some uses, but it has several problems 
to it:

** Price
Acrobat costs about NOK 3,712.50 (more than 600$)

**Platform
As far as I can see you only have the windows version, so I suppose you 
are using wine or something similar to have it run on your Linux box. 
Virtualization may also be an option. All this adds complexity.

**Changes
I have just separated my document in two parts, but afterwards I decided 
to change the design, fonts etc. Of course if you don't, no problem with 
your approach. But this makes your workflow inflexible, and the reason 
why you are using Scribus and not Lyx (I suppose--But lyx or similar 
programs may be really good options for some) is because you want to 
master your own design, and if you do so you will not always know at 
once what and how to do things. That way you will have to rework your 
style or the format of your pages etc--not one time, but several 
times--one for each document. Such repetative tasks could of course be 
scripted, if you know how to do it. But I suppose most people don't.
This also has to do with the workflow: Humans, unlike machines, do not 
go straight from A to B with everything planned up all the way: 
Intuition, phantasy, changes of opinions, things you forget etc. make 
humans work different, more back and forth--new ideas may keep emerging 
all through the working process and make you resketch former works and 
decisions.

Of course if all things are settled and you are doing the same magazine 
for the x't time, then this may not be a big problem (but also magazines 
change :-)

If Scribus could use the approach of master documents (as OOo) then this 
approach could loose all this disadvantages.
Are there plans to support this? Without it, I don't find document 
splitting to be a viable alternative :-)

**Alternative
* You may of course add the pages of another document to the current, 
but then unlinked (but if you really *are* finished you perhaps don't 
care about that).
* You may also add just the first (unlinked) frame with your text and 
then reflow your text (but then you will have to replace all the then 
emerging "copy of ..."-styles and similar. But you can easily reuse your 
styles, the page settings and the master pages from the reworked 
document. But then again: kerning, images etc. will have to be done 
anew, or not before after the merge.

**Lastly
By the way, the images are not what really slows Scribus down (at least 
not by me) but the linking of many frames in one big, long chain.

Best regards
Axel Bojer