[scribus] Some thoughts from a daily user

[Jean Mielot]

Hi all

Been a while since I've been on the list.

I just finished my third Big Issue designed completely in Scribus.

My second issue is viewable here:
http://www.bigissue.org.za/issue-192/issue-192 - for anyone who might care.
The contrast/saturation of the flipbook is not quite accurate - Still
getting to grips with Imagemagick's nuances.
I will be adding this new issue on Thursday.

I essentially work with Scribus on a daily basis - it's my job - and I
cannot emphasise again how mature
and brilliant this program is.

Coming from Indesign/Photoshop and switching to Gimp/Scribus was a tad
daunting, but I believe I have
completely proven to myself that the open source design tools are exactly
where they should be
and not a poor man's adobe - but a brilliant alternative. Well done all
involved again!

I have been meaning to put together a list of grievances and ideas, but
just can't find the time,
but as a daily user my wishlist could be summarised as this:

1. More intuitive microtypography

This was one of my first issues on the mailing list, but a.l.e pointed out
that "perfect" typography is achievable
by just playing around with some advanced settings.

I can vouch that that is more or less true, but there is room for
improvement - haven't checked out 1.5 yet -
wil see how it's progressing there.


2. Shrink textframe to text - or baseline.

This is also one I've mentioned before. Making a little block with
perfectly horizontal and verticallly centred text
is not possible - which means an additional block is required behind the
text to simulate this.

If textframes can end on the baseline and allow descenders to extend, one
can perhaps work in a padding model -
like the current columns & text distances, but better.

Try and achieve THIS label with 2 textframes - impossible:
http://www.bigissue.org.za/misc/scribus/label.jpg

I have tried the adjust to content python scripts - and they're good, but I
could never get the vertical one to work.


3. Soft Dropshadows

Need I say more.


4. PDF's are too big

My 48 page magazine exported with 300dpi and quite a few embeded fonts
currently weighs in at 317MB!
The Indesign ones never ended up more than 150MB - I'm not using
excessively more images so I'm not sure
where the bulk comes from.

This might seem trivial, but we upload the magazine to a Kodak Insite
system and on a slow 60kb/s connection
on deadline this is tedious.

Where could the bulk be coming from? Any ideas how we can reduce this?


5. Colour picking without having to save or name the colour.

Often I want text to match a clour scheme in a picture - picking the colour
of course works, but I don't think it's
really neccesarry to always save a picked colour in the pallette if it's
only being used one. Indesign is a good example
of how a temporary colour can be applied.


6. A more incremential zoom would be nice.
It seems one is sometimes choosing between CLOSE and FAR - a gradual 1%
mousewheel zoom would be great!

7. Selecting text over multiple columns.
If I want to select specific text in a paragraph that spans multiple
columns - I have to resize the subsequent column to
bring the text into the first and select it - annoying.

These are just things that were annoying me in this last issue and would
make my life easier. There ARE other things
as well. Some of them are bugs and some of them I'm sure are scriptable -
must just find time to investigate.


My top annoying bugs at the moment:

Firstly for such a complex and powerful program it's incredibly stable I
have to say. In Indesign I ended up with at lease a
crash every few days - I have not experienced any Scribus crashes :-)
(except once when exporting jpegs, but using imagemagick now)

1. Applying master to page makes canvas jump to the pasteboard on the left
- this is very frustrating little bug and happens often.
I think there is a bug report for that.

2. Selected text properties not always accurate.
This one is quite big, but I realised that selecting the text from left ro
right gives the correct details.

3. Color pallete for text sometimes fills entire screen
As you can see I'm nitpicking now - minor annoyance this one.


I work in the streetpaper industry - there are about 120 around the world.
It is my aim to get all these papers
and magazines to use Scribus. I have some thoughts on achieving this,
perhaps with the help of the
Scribus community, but that's another e-mail alltogether.

Many thanks

J
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