[scribus] Newbie Mac User

[John Culleton]

On Sunday 23 August 2009 18:35:16 a.l.e wrote:
> ciao peter,
>
> > No, lots of people use Debian because it has a large number of
> > packages and its stability. It is simply not true that Debian is
> > more "free" than others. openSUSE, Fedora and Mandriva all have
> > releases which are equally "free".
> >
> > Both openSUSE and Fedora while started by corporate entities,
> > have explicitly made re-distributable "re-spins" of their distro
> > available.
>
> there are debian guidelines which are seen as more strict than what
> is common for other distribution.
>
> some parts are similar in other free distributions, some not.
>
> imho, most of the differences are related to different views on
> what freedom is...
>
>
> ciao
> a.l.e
>
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The major distinction is that Debian is wedded to Gnome and some other 
distros, including the one I use, Slackware, use as little of Gnome 
as possible, relying  on KDE instead.  It is one of those Hatfield 
versus Coy feuds, like Vi versus Emacs.  With Slackware if a program 
is available in a tarball Slack can compile it. There need not be 
dependence on someone's update to a particular collection.   

Someone in this thread made joking comment about my unwillingness to 
use Scribus for anything except book cover art. Well, I use Scribus 
when I can. My e-book "Create Book Covers with Scribus" began as a 
Scribus project. But I had a file size limit of (I was told) 2MB for 
a Booklocker ebook (actually 3MB I later discovered.)  PDF file sizes 
from Scribus tend to balloon, whereas pdftex is very thrifty with 
file size.  It was frankly a pain to do it in TeX but necessary 
because of file size. 

For my other work, typesetting of (mostly) novels, Scribus at this 
point bogs down on big word counts.  That may be ameliorated in the 
future but I fear it is inherent in the Scribus structure.

Add to this the lack of many of the typesetting amenities which make 
TeX superior, such as paragraph at a time justification, indexing, 
widow and orphan suppression, true footnotes,  combined with my own  
familiarity with the TeX approach going back to 1995 or so, and 
Scribus isn't the tool I pick up for book length tasks.  It is not 
that it can't be done---I remember people doing accounting programs 
in Fortran instead of COBOL---but that it is very inconveniently 
done. 

I look forward to more advances in Scribus, and doing more work in it, 
as time goes by.



-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters