[scribus] Success-Story

[hjh at mail.fsub.de]

As Maciej Hanski asked to promote Scribus by publishing ones own
success-story, I put down the following, which you will find at the
appopriate place:


Produced with Scribus 1.3.3.12, OpenOffice and Emacs:
-----------------------------------------------------

As all my writing is to be presented on the internet, I developed a set of
HTML-tags, which make my texts easy readable, using a lot of
headlines, indents and fine tuned leadings: Taming the black.

I use six different stylesheets, for six different screen resolutions.
This way, the letters on the screen have nearly always the same physical
size.

Of course, to transfer the text to OpenOffice, you have to filter the
HTML-tags, tag by tag, to give the tags a definite value. This is easily
done by an Emacs-script for each tag, nearly all identical, using the
tag-search-and-replace mechanism of Emacs, a very valuable piece of
software for many instances. All files are processed at the same time by
the chain of filters. So it doesn't take long, to bring it in the
HTML-form, that OpenOffice can read and can take over the
layout-formats. (If interested, have a look at
www.fsub.org/wissen/itwissen/1wissen-index-itwissen.htm [1].)

I read all the chapters into OpenOffice, so that the whole book became one
file. And this file was read into Scribus, so that all paragraphs of a
kind have the same style in scribus.

I used to treat the leadings as a paragraph of their own, which makes it
much easier to control the wrapping of a page.

After page layout had been done, I adapted the page wrapping in the
OpenOffice version. And I marked in this version all the words, that were
to make up the index. So I generated the table of content and the index in
OpenOffice. Comfortable and automatic.


Problems:
---------

1. Sometimes paragraph styles took up other values, I don't know why.

2. Anoying: Changing from surface mode to edit mode and back, the marker
went- nearly always - to the top of the file in edit mode. You had to
scroll up to the line under construction again and again. A nuisance.

3. The biggest problem was to find information to a certain question.
Scribus knowledge is scattered over many different media. This causes a
waste of time, much time. For those, who work with scribus day by day,
this is probably no problem. But for us, who only use it as a novice
and/or from time to time, we have start from scratch. I already
reported, but this doesn't seem to be a problem for those, who could
change it. I pointed out, that there are so many different media,
reporting to the same topic. Of course, there is a very good handbook and
I got a copy before it was published, which was really helpfull. But while
reading it - and other sources - I would like to be able to
contribute exactly to the text in question. And I would appreciate all
information to a certain topic to be transfered to one and only one place.
Which means, that the official server and the wiki server and ... are to
be merged.


Very well:
----------

The PDF-export: No problems - Acrobat Reader controlled - The print shop
had no objection. The Gimp-produced cover, read into Scribus, exported as
pdf. Worked also fine with the print shop.


Sorry:
------

As this project was finished three months ago, I don't remember every
detail. But the support of the list was really helpfull.






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