[scribus] Font / Style Signifiers in Story editor

[John Beardmore]

John Jason Jordan wrote:

> 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 said that Pagemaker development would cease as I recall.


> 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.

Certainly not import projects from Pagemaker.  1.0 should have been 
released as a 'taster', not as a product !


> Even 1.5 was too buggy.

:)  Then again, so was Pagemaker...

And somewhere along the way they released Pagemaker 7, not that I ever 
tried it.

What a fiasco it all was !


> But with 2.0 I moved everything
> to InDesign

I never tried too.  I felt so messed about that I decided to stop 
throwing money at Adobe and stick with Pagemaker 6.52 and Indesign 1.5. 
  It wasn't a very satisfactory state of affairs, but fortunately it has 
been resolved by the emergence of Scribus.

For years I didn't imagine we'd see open source DTP, but now here it is. 
Now I'm waiting for OSS to work its magic on CAD and electronics design 
software !


> ...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.

This is always the way I've worked, though for some reason, many layout 
software purists seem determined to separate editing from layout, even 
to the extent of preferring to use an external text editor.

My preference would be include spell check as you type functionality in 
text frame editing too.


> 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.

Well no doubt redoing the layout dynamically with great precision uses a 
  lot of resource, but I find it works OK on a 2008 2.4 GHz core duo 
laptop under 1.3.3.x. It wasn't so good on a 1.8 GHz 2005 single core 
Pentium M though.

1.3.3.x also seemed to have some issues selecting things with the mouse. 
This occasionally drives me to use the story editor, but I understand 
that this is fixed with the move to QT4 in 1.3.5.

As machines get faster and the code gets more optimised, I'll have even 
less use for the story editor, though as things will stand in 1.3.5 / 
1.4 I'll need it for spell checking, assuming that the aspell interface 
ever makes it into the windows code.


> So no one should take what I say as a
> criticism of Scribus; rather, just a wish from a happy user.

Same here !

For all the niggles with Scribus, it bows away the versions of Pagemaker 
and InDesign that I use(d) !  Long live Scribus !


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