[scribus] Printing as Spread

[Louis Desjardins]

2011/7/22 John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com>

> On Thursday, July 21, 2011 12:05:08 pm a.l.e wrote:
> > hi,
> >
> > > Would it be a long-coding task to make available an
> option that would
> > > allow to "Print as Spread" a certain number of pages?
> > >
> > > What would be involved here if we'd like to implement
> this in the Print
> > > and in the Export to PDF dialogs?
> >
> > i guess that it is "easy" to do, if all scribus users
> agree that they
> > never will request anything more complicated than what
> acrobat reader
> > offers as booklet print.
> >
> > since i'm sure that the day this is implemented, we will
> have requests
> > to do more than that (yourself are talking about "a
> certain number of
> > pages" which won't always match 2), i'm not really
> comfortable with the
> > idea of adding it to scribus.
> >
> > what we need is a program whici is able to correclty
> spreadify PDFs
> > created by scribus... and we were very close to have one
> with podofo
> > impose some time ago...
> >
> >
> > can't that project be brought to life again?
> >
> > ciao
> > a.l.e
> >
> >
>
> With PSUtils readily available I would categorize this
> requirement as "nice to have" rather than "must have."
> There are other areas of equal or grater difficulty worthy
> of attention. If we require Scribus to do all things it
> may become overweight and more difficult to maintain. The
> table of contents feature, running heads
> keyed to the current content, indexing, tabulation etc.
> deserve attention.
>

John,

I understand what you say. But some features are "must have" for some people
are some other are "nice to have". Depends on the point of view. I am sure
you can come up with very good examples where table of content and running
heads and indexing and tabulation (but this we do have, don't we?) are a
necessity. On the particular points you are raising, I could too, if this
was the topic. We do lots of books in a year in my business. And we have to
be *very* efficient because once we have the material in hand time becomes a
big chunk in the equation. But for now, this is another discussion.

Back to spreads.

We have this misleading feature right from the start in Scribus that is
displayed in the very first window all users will see once the application
is launched. These 3-fold and 4-fold options only by there name are
completely misleading. People try it, expect something that won't happen and
then they are caught, they have to go back, start again, figure out what's
missing there. In any event, time and effort was lost. Not very efficient in
a workflow.

I am trying to figure out ways of fixing this by either renaming the options
(the minimum we could do is better label the options and put a warning in
the tooltip + update the documentation if it's not already done) and by
trying to figure out what is needed in terms of coding time so we can "print
as spread". We have been told that this half-implemented feature would not
be removed, so I have to accept this reality and try to find solutions that
will respect both the coders *and* the users.

One thing I "require" is we clarify this to the benefit of the users. I
believe it's a fair "requirement" that won't take too much time and that
doesn't even require any coding time. There are paths to solutions in the
bug tracker for that issue. People writing better English than me can tweak
this and turn it into a nice expression of a very few words that would take
care of the issue on the short term. (If it was only me I would remove those
two options until we make it a feature that really works but again, this
won't happen.)

The other thing I would like to find out is the coding effort in time.

Once we know the coding time required, we will then have to ask ourselves
what particular coding skills does that imply. Then we could decide whether
it's worth the effort or not considering all the other specific requirements
that are also worth digging.

The initial question raised in this thread still remains to be answered.

Louis






> --
> John Culleton
>
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>
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