[scribus] Scribus Limits, Present and Future

[John Morris]

   I'm very new to Scribus and am still evaluating it to see it if 
will fit in my toolbox. For now, I have been mostly reading this 
discussion list to get ideas of how Scribus works and occasionally 
trying things out when they occur to me. Overall, I'm very impressed 
with it, but a.l.e's comments about Scribus' limitations took me by 
surprise.
   I can certainly see the value of a product like Scribus for the 
production of very short documents (up to about 50 pages with no 
chains of text boxes longer than about 10 pages). However, I had been 
expecting Scribus to be able to handle much longer and more complex 
documents. Therefore, I would like some clarification of these limits 
and Scribus' planned future direction.

1. It sounds to me from a.l.e's and John Beardmore's comments that I 
should not expect Scribus to smoothly handle any single file of more 
than about 50 or 60 pages, regardless of the linkages between text 
boxes. Is that correct? This seems like a pretty significant 
limitation for producing medium to long book projects. Does Scribus 
support some sort of book system where master pages, page numbers and 
other bits can be controlled across multiple files?

2. It sounds to me from a.l.e's comments that I should not expect 
Scribus to smoothly handle linkages of text boxes covering more than 
about 10 pages, regardless of the number of pages in the document. 
Again, this seems like a serious limitation given that a chapter in a 
longer book might be 30 or 50 pages long. For the books I have worked 
on in the past, the chapter is the lowest level that would 
conveniently be broken from one section to the next.

3. What are the plans for Scribus' future? Are these limits actively 
being raised? If not, what other OS tools are available for producing 
the longer books for which Scribus is not well suited?

Thanks for your insight.
John

>addendum: scribus won't be able to manage a text flow of 150 to 300
>pages!
>
>you should break you document in several files of about 50 pages.
>
>you should also create text flows which are just a few
>pages (about 10?) long.