[scribus] Scribus Limits, Present and Future

[John Beardmore]

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Aug 2009 11:45:01 -0400
> John Morris <johnjeff at editide.us> dijo:

> This is the first long document I have done in Scribus. In the past I
> have done textbooks in InDesign on Windows 2000, up to 550 pages.
> InDesign ran as fast with a 550 page document open as it did with a one
> page document open. I have also used PageMaker, QuarkXPress and Venture
> previously and never had an issue about slow speed when working on long
> documents.

When I began using Pagemaker 6.5 I had a real quick machine which was a 
200MHz pentium. That seemed to slow down as the number of pages 
increased, but that may be because it only had 256 meg of RAM.

In the end I moved some of our work to InDesign 1.5, but neither that or 
Pagemaker were that stable or good at generating high resolution PDFs, 
even with documents of 30 to 40 pages. Given the costs of upgrading to 
CS*, we didn't / couldn't / wouldn't. Those stability issues have not 
gone away on modern machines, so I guess they were bugs / design 
failings rather than machine resource issues. they may have been 
addressed in later versions of the software I guess, but at Adobe 
prices, I really resent having to upgrade just to get software that 
doesn't crash !

Except in respect of WISIWYG in text frame editing, Scribus to date has 
been massively superior to either of those, certainly with documents of 
60 to 70 pages. It really would be good to know what makes Scribus slow 
down in big documents and assay what various people have managed easily 
/ got away with.

I suppose until 1.3.5 is released, there isn't much point in comparing 
experiences in detail, but maybe once 1.3.5 is out we should all 
contribute the following information for our larger projects ?

     Processor
     RAM
     Document number pages
     Page size
     Average number of linked text frames
     Maximum number of linked text frames
     Numbers of characters in linked text frapmes
     Which operations in Scribus are least responsive


This isn't an issue that's going to go away. Every new user seems to ask 
it / be concerned about it, and the more precise the answers we can 
give, the better prospective users can decide if Scribus does what we need.

I appreciate all of the above are rather clumsy metrics and somewhat 
subjective, better suggestions welcome !  But they are possibly better 
than the indicators we can generally offer at the moment, which are 
generally "large", or on a good day, a number of pages of unspecified size.


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
Consultancy and Installation, Carbon Trust Standard Registered Assessor
Phone: 0845 4561332   Mobile: 07785 563116   Skype: t4sustainability