[scribus] Taking the plunge with Scribus!

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi Bruce,
>
> 1) Booklet printing.  I think I have this one licked, but it is going to
> take some serious explaining to get your average copy-center worker to
> follow the procedure in section 8.4.3 of the manual.  It would be a lot
> more convenient to incorporate booklet printing and imposition into the
> PDF export section of Scribus.  Under pressure, I made a silly decision
> to make full legal size pages with the imposition done myself, so my
> pages were 12-1, 2-11, 10-3, 4-9, 8-5, 6-7.  This worked with the FedEx
> Office people, but I found it time consuming to convert this to a normal
> order on half-pages to post a web version (in fact, as I write the first
> draft of this, I have one more to convert, two days after the end of the
> tournament, with e-mails wondering where these issues are!).  I think
> with a little experimentation with my own printer I can write a document
> detailing how to do the imposition within Acrobat Reader for the
> Penticton people.  But it would be a lot easier to have Scribus able to
> make the printer-version as a PDF export option.

This has been discussed over and over and over again. We even had a GSoC 
project that tried to implement booklet printing, a project that failed in 
the end, due to various reasons. One thing to consider is that Scribus uses 
high-level PostScript features for direct printing, some of which aren't 
supported by most drivers for consumer printers. We therefore recommend to 
export to PDF and then to print from Adobe Reader.

>
> 2) Escape is impossible from the Master Pages dialog box!  This one
> drove me so nuts that I abandoned making master pages and just made a
> separate rectangle and draped some text on top of it for the bottom of
> each page.
> Once you hit Edit/Master Pages, the dialog box that comes up (Edit
> Master Pages) has no exit button.  The only way out, once you have
> created the Master Pages that you want, is to exit the program and
> restart!  I must be missing something here, but whatever the solution
> is, it is far from obvious.  What is needed is a exit button on that
> dialog box that saves the master pages you have created and returns you
> to editing the document.

Errm, did you see that little x in the title bar of the dialog? If not, blame 
it on Ubuntu ;)

>
> 3) "Copy of" paragraph styles are a major hassle.  I often have a
> paragraph style that for just one instance I want to centre instead of
> justify, or make bold instead of italic, or change the text size
> slightly, or whatever.  If Scribus feels honour-bound to keep each of
> these once-only styles as a "Copy of" style, that's fine, but please put
> them at the bottom of the list, so that I don't need to wade through
> them to get the styles that I actually use.

While I'm not quite sure what you mean, I know that there is an issue with 
copied styles in 1.3.5+, and it's one of the major reasons for not releasing 
version 1.4, yet.

>
> 4) Tabs in Style Editor.  I make pretty extensive use of all kinds of
> tabs in displaying result data from the various types of bridge events.
> I spend a considerable amount of time converting the raw data from the
> bridge scoring program to formatted data with tabs.  We need to have a
> look at creating styles and setting tabs.  Comparing to the Attributes
> box's XYZ section, this is the difference:
>
> --In the Attributes Box, we see numbers like this: 0.2444 in
> --In the Edit Styles area, we see numbers like this in the tabs section:
> 0.2453800000000000000000000000000000000003452349256 in
>
> I know what I find easier to work with.  Yet, when I tried to edit the
> tab specs, often I would edit the above meganumber to '0.25 in' and
> click elsewhere, and look back to find that it was suddenly something
> like 67.234347194582.....

This sounds like a typical Ubuntu bug. I tested under OpenSUSE, as well as 
Windows XP and 7. Repeat after me: If you want to use Scribus, don't use 
Ubuntu!

>
> 5) Story Editor Problems.  In general, I like the Story Editor far
> better than editing a story directly.  It works well for multiple edits,
> you can update and see the changes right away, even in a long story that
> carries over several pages, and for the most part it seemed to work
> well.  I'm actually quite surprised at this: when I started using MS
> Publisher I did not own a copy of Word and the word processor within
> Publisher was the most powerful word processor I had!  A few problems I
> faced in Scribus's Story Editor:
>
> --I had a paragraph style that called for 2pt type on 3pt leading, that
> I used without any actual text, to create small spaces quickly.  When I
> wanted to center two lines with one or two intervening small-space
> lines, I would select the text from the start of the first to the end of
> the next, including the small-space lines, and click on the center
> button.  This invariably changed the size of all the text within the
> selection to 2pt.  Other attributes remained the same.  This badly needs
> a fix; it's inconvenient to have to select each line separately and center.

This description is a bit confusing (at least for me).

>
> --I was forever clicking on the styles for individual paragraphs in the
> Story Editor to change the style for that paragraph.  Selecting the text
> for multiple paragraphs and changing the style only changes the listed
> style for the first.  This needs to be corrected.

No need for corrections. Just select the text and apply the style from the 
dropdown list in the menu bar (hey, you have the manual! ;) )

>
> --'Underline everything' does not seem to include tab spaces.  Most of
> my game result headings look something like this:
>
> Score  MPts   A    B    C     Thursday Open
> Pairs                                 (13, 14 tables)
>
> These columns are for a pair's score, the masterpoints they have won by
> finishing at their final rank, their rank in strat A, B and C (in
> tournament bridge, all pairs are eligible for strat A, but only pairs
> with less experience are eligible for the lower strats, which have their
> separate rankings and masterpoint awards), the names and cities of the
> players (under the name of the event in the header line), and (on the
> header line only, on a right-tab) the number of tables playing in the
> event.  The whole header line should be underlined, but Scribus insisted
> on this:
>
> Score  MPts   A    B    C     Thursday Open
> Pairs                                 (13, 14 tables)
> -----  ----   -    -    -
> -------------------                                 ---------------

Confirmed. Would you mind filing a bug report (bugs.scribus.net)?

You can use "Underscore" as a fill style in the style editor, though.

Thanks for the detailed report!

Christoph