[scribus] Typesetting of books

[laurin Mckinnon]

I've recently done a 400+ page novel (though with minimal graphics) and
it seemed ok to me. Granted it did take a bit of time to open the file,
preflight (if there were problems), save and print, but I don't think it
was excessive. Corrections went in at proof stage in page view (ie not
in the story editor) as fast as the editor and I could work. I've
previously found that giving Scribus a reasonable of processor power and
memory makes a considerable difference. As does having the latest
software, both system and Scribus. I'm currently running Scribus 1.3.5
and Debian jaunty on a P4 2,8MHz, 2GB ram; hardly a monster setup.

It'd be interesting to know others' current experiences with long
documents.

And I did learn two new tricks. On creation of my file, I had not set
the default font for the document, and it was set on an otherwise unused
font, but one I didn't really want to have to include in my output pdf.
Deselecting it in the pdf setup dialog gave a missing font warning.
Search and replace no help. But disabling the font in the Scribus font
preferences meant Scribus wanted to replace all occurances with
something - ah and my document's body text font was perfect. Afterwards,
it seems too simple.

The other trick was new to me but maybe documented in help or manuals.
It can save an awful lot of time. When starting a new chapter, import
the text into the first page of the chapter, then apply styles to the
whole chapter in the story editor. Return to page view, save, and 'add
pages' (you'll have to guess how many, make it too many). Magically, as
the pages are added the pre styled text flows 'automatically' into them.
Delete the excess pages minus one - start chapter 2! A chapter can be
laid out in perhaps a minute. I guess that's exactly how it should work,
but thanks to the Scribus developers for getting details like this
right.

have a great day
regards
Laurin

On Fri, 2009-09-18 at 13:15 +0200, Leander Sukov wrote:
> In our company we use Scribus for single page layouts (flyers, book covers 
> etc), but we are using still pagemaker and indesign for the block. Scribus 
> is still very, very slow and unhandleable when it has to work with more 
> than ten or twenty pages. We could split the books in small parts of course 
> and assemble them again, but then this is not very often a good way for the 
> setting of a book.
> Before we are going to invest in both new apple computers and new programms 
> from Adobe, I would like to know, if there is a timeline which shows that 
> even setting two hundred or more page in one file could be workable with 
> scribus in near future.
> 
> Leander