[scribus] Scribus does the Wrong Thing

[Joe Zeff]

As I've mentioned before, I use Scribus to publish my contributions to 
an APA.  (Amateur Publishing Association)  I do my composition in Libre 
Office then import the text to Scribus, apply styles and do whatever 
other formatting seems needed.  In general, this works well.

In the disty that came out on Dec 6, one of the other contributors 
franked a comic strip called "Dry Bones" that had one of the characters 
talking about Channukah.  The word was spelled differently in each panel 
and the point was that although Jews all celebrate it, we can't agree on 
how to spell it.  In the next week's disty, I commented to him that the 
correct spelling was חנוכה

This worked Just Fine in Libre Office, and I hope that all of you are 
seeing it the way I do.  (The word should be in Hebrew script.)  It 
imported OK into Scribus until I applied the styles.  Alas, in Print 
Preview, it didn't show up because the font I was using didn't have the 
glyphs.  Even after finding the right font (Tahoma) it didn't show up 
right because Scribus reversed the order of the characters.

Just in case some of you don't know, Hebrew is written right to left. 
When I copied the characters into Libre Office, they were in the right 
order and stayed that way.  Scribus, however, assumed that I'd entered 
them one at a time and reversed them.  The only way I could force 
Scribus to display them the way they needed to be was to use the 
Character Generator to set up the string in reverse order and paste that 
in.  Then, Scribus reversed them into what I needed.

Now, I can understand doing that if (and ONLY if) I were entering the 
string into the Story Editor.  Imagine, however, if I were to compose a 
long passage in Hebrew and import it.  There should be some way to tell 
Scribus not to reverse such text as it's imported or, at the very least, 
it should ask before making the change.  If it helps, I'm using Fedora 
16 Linux with whatever version Fedora supplies, although I'm fairly sure 
it's the current stable version.  Before reporting this officially, I'd 
like to see what other users think: is this a bug, a mis-feature or 
simply something that I could have prevented with a setting I'm unaware of?