[scribus] Font / Style Signifiers in Story editor

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 28 May 2009 20:58:09 -0700
Jessica Evans <jessica at lunula.com> dijo:

> One other note about cursor location. This is another feature request.  I'd
> like it if the cursor placement within the text box was replicated in the
> Story Editor. In other words, if I see something in the text box that needs
> fixing, I'd like to be able to use the cursor tool to place the cursor 
> there, then right-mouse-click -> Edit Text, and have the Story Editor appear 
> with the cursor in that same location. Ditto for selected text in the text box: 
> it would appear already-selected in the Story Editor.

Yes, I was going to add this thought myself, but I didn't because I
suspect it might be a lot of effort for the developers. InDesign does
it this way (there I go again!). I was trying to limit my suggestions
to things that I thought would be simple, yet add polish to the user
interface.

In fact, for those who are not familiar with the story of InDesign, the
first version (1.0) had no story editor. At the time the reigning GUI
layout programs were PageMaker and QuarkXPress, with the latter having
the lion's share of the market. QuarkXPress had no story editor either,
and Adobe saw QuarkXPress as their marketing target for InDesign. But
Adobe also wanted to migrate PageMaker users to InDesign. And PageMaker
users cried loudly for a story editor like PageMaker had. InDesign 1.5
still had no story editor, but with 2.0 the wails of the PageMaker
users were finally answered. 

I started with InDesign 1.0, although it was so buggy I couldn't do
much with it. Even 1.5 was too buggy. But with 2.0 I moved everything
to InDesign and abandoned PageMaker. The interesting thing is that
editing directly in the frame in InDesign is almost as fast as editing
in the story editor. I rarely used the InDesign story editor. And I
would not use it in Scribus either, except that editing directly in the
frame in Scribus is painfully slow.

What I'm saying is that I'd rather see sufficient speed improvements in
direct editing in the frame as to make the story editor redundant. But
that may take substantial coding effort. I am not a programmer so I
have no idea why direct editing in the frame is so slow or what it
would take to improve it. So no one should take what I say as a
criticism of Scribus; rather, just a wish from a happy user.