[scribus] The Scribus target - a question for the developers

[Pierre Marchand]

Vous (John Culleton) avez écrit :
> I have many product resources, all Open Source. I consider Scribus to
> be a niche product. It is strong for book covers, illustrated
> newsletters, coffee table books  and the like. It will never replace
> e.g., TeX for long books or books with with indexes, footnotes etc.

It could at some point. You must think of the Scribus team as people who 
mainly find it fun to deliver a high quality package. All what ’s challenging 
gives us this extra fuel which keeps us awaken till insane hours.  

> When I typeset a novel I don't want to jump through hoops just to get
> widow/orphan suppression, running heads and so on. 

Huh, I have had my share of "overfull box", thanks :-)

> And things like 
> hanging punctuation, microtypography and so on are just beyond the
> reach of Scribus or any similar product.

Avox did a great job at implementing large parts of Han The Thanh (sorry for 
the missing accents, bad copy & paste) dissertation. Mix that with near 
projects which have been discussed recently such as non-latin scripts support 
or paragraph based justification and you would see Scribus with another eye.

> There are horses for courses, as they used to say at the race track.
>
> My major complaint is slow operation. Others complain too and at least
> one has recently abandoned Scribus for this reason.

Sad but right, in some extent.

>
> I have already asked for PDF/X1a:2001 compliant output for book covers
> for LSI but got no positive vibes back. 

I will repeat here what has been said a couple of times, it’s not the moment 
for good vibes about new features as long as 1.3.5 is not out. But be sure 
that we are basically excited with what users ask for, when we have time!

> In the USA this is a serious 
> handicap.  One has to buy Acrobat Distiller just for this feature, or
> accept degraded cover art.
>
> I am grateful for Scribus as is. I look forward to the next stable
> series.

Thanks.

-- 
Pierre Marchand