[scribus] Scribus Limits, Present and Future

[John Beardmore]

John Morris wrote:

> 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?

Actually I didn't even notice Scribus slowing down (apart from load 
time) for 50 to 60 page documents, but my runs of link text frames never 
run to more than a few pages, and I generally have a lot of graphs and 
photographs.

I'm left with the impression that at least on a 2.4 Ghz machine with 4 
gig of RAM, it could do bigger docs.  It was noticeably poorer in its 
performance on a 1.8 GHz box with 2 gig of RAM, but that was back in the 
days of 1.3.3.9 so things may have got better, and I've seen it work  on 
P/III boxes at 800HMz too, though I've not played much in that environment.

Editing within Scribus has been clunky but usable since before I started 
using it, but has improved steadily.  Groups of linked text frames can 
be a bit grumpy to edit, but I've never had significant problems.

It would be interesting to try importing some really long passages into 
Scribus linked text frames, to try and tease out if the thing that slows 
it down is number of pages, density of characters, or number of linked 
frames etc.

A lot of advice on this seems a bit anecdotal, possibly based on old 
versions, and possibly pessimistic.  I'd experiment to find out before 
embarking of a big project, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't do it, 
and you may not even need to split the work.  Maybe start off with a 
couple of 50 page chapters ?  Feedback might inform priorities for 
future development (or let us know how far we've come !), so would 
probably be of use to the wider community too.


Cheers, J/.
-- 
John Beardmore, MSc EDM (Open), B.A. Chem (Oxon), CMIOSH, AIEMA, MEI
Managing Director, T4 Sustainability Limited. http://www.T4sLtd.co.uk/
Energy Audit, Carbon Management, Design Advice, Sustainable Energy
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