[scribus] Editing a book, any hints or gothchas?

[Fredrik Jonson]

Hi All,

I've just begun editing a book in scribus, and I have a few questions.

The book will have a soft cover and contain about 250 pages, mostly text.
There will be a few images, probably greyscale inline in the text chaptes,
and a separate color image section in the middle or end of the book.

Each chapter is 10 - 30 pages. I've seen advice on the list that some people
keep each chapter in a separate scribus document for performance reasons.
But is that really necessary? If I use contemporary hardware, does scribus
still have a hard time with < 300 pages mostly text?

I'd like to use footnotes in each chapter, and afaiu it is available in 1.5,
which isn't released yet. I'm on 1.4.4 on Ubuntu. What is your advice?
Should I try to install 1.5, and if so, what is the best way to do that on
Ubuntu 14.04?  (I don't mind a few bugs, so the fact that it isn't released
yet doesn't scare me too much. Beta quality is definitively ok, pre-alpha,
perhaps not so much. But I'm willing to give it a go. :) What are the
alternatives if I'm stuck on 1.4.4. Any examples of manual footnote
handling, etc? 

In the best of worlds, I'd like to automatically import footnotes from ODT
libreoffice documents. That'd be awesome. :)

Is there any way to automatically add text frames that fills the page margin
when you add pages? Right now I'm copy/pasting a blank text frame as I go
when I add pages, but that's a bit tedious and error prone.

The search/replace in the story editor is great. I get scripts that have
titles prefixed with H1, H2, etc, so it is easy to map that to the styles
I've edited and remove the prefix from the text in one go. Now, as a I have
many chapters, I wonder if I can script that, rather than do it manually?
Does the python script api contain any functions similar to the story editor
search/replace. I like that the script language in scribus is python btw,
yay!

Is there any way to remove the "Default character style" and "Default
paragraph style"? I just want the styles I'm actually using, to reduce
editing mistakes.

BTW, the style editor is a bit funky, it doesn't always update when values
are changed, and sometimes values like selected font, and style inheritance
seems to get lost while editing and switching between tabs. But I guess
these are known bugs for 1.4.4?

Oh, and in general, what is the common way to work with cover pages? Do
I maintain that as a separate document?

Guess that's it for now. Thanks for a great piece of software, and thanks
in advance for any comments.

-- 
Fredrik Jonson