[Scribus] Usability needs attention -- time for a feature moratorium?

JLuc jluc
Fri Feb 1 11:27:48 CET 2008


John Beardmore a ?crit :
> JLuc wrote:
>> There seems to be a tremendous enthousiasm to develop
>> very precise high profile features
>> while basic usability is ... missing.

> Can you be more specific please ?  What are you trying to achieve or use 
> which is missing ?

Last time I tried to use scribus for real work
it was about 4 month ago & i spent 2 full days trying.
At that time, i managed to do one page documents with pleasure,
but couldn't efficiently build multipage mixed text and image documents.

I dont remember the details so well.
I submited hqkf a dozen of bugs, & at least one of them has been solved.

1) Scribus kept crashing.
(since then, i switched from an old XP to a new Ubuntu
and a new Vista, and scribus might prove more stable ?)

2) the linked text frames problems
I suppose none of the success stories use linked text frames...
(I understood I had to wait qt4 and v1.6 ...
that is a couple of years I guess)
for example http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=6242 )

3) editing text & character styles
(i know this is not scribus team way of doing
but this is how i do : text and layout together so they fit.
Sure i can adapt and learn other ways of doing,
but however, i need to be able to edit text details after layout,
and the "story" text editor tool didnt fit at all
with messing character styles with paragraphs or so)

and use of character styles
(fragile, not completed at that time,
few facilities, no search & replace if i remember well,
not on the same level of quality as the paragraph styles...)

4) undo facility
(wouldnt be so necessary when the rest would work well
on first go)

I sometime wonder whether i am missing something
because some people seem to use scribus well,
but this is my personnal experience !
JLuc




More information about the scribus mailing list