[scribus] Scribus and long documents.

[John Culleton]

Scribus has a serious flaw, one that
limits its practial utility to short documents.
This is not a flaw susceptible of a quick fix, or
even a slow fix. 

A book length  document of 100 pages or more
slows the program down to a point that is not
tolerable. If one breaks down the document into
ten page segments then problems occur in page
numbering, the TOC, indexing and so on. 

TeX solves this problem by storing a limited
amount of specifics in memory, then processing a
text file a line at a time when asked to
transform the document into a final form.
Of course TeX is not WYSIWYG, handles
illustrations clumsily, does not use layers with
any degree of handiness etc. A TeX run resembles
the compilation of a program. 

I don't have an answer for the problem. Perhaps
each page could be stored separately in a keyed
database and then be called up into memory as
requested. But if the processing of book length
projects remains a process of extreme awkwardness 
I see a limited role for Scribus in my activities.

Perhaps a user who successfully prepares book
length documents, 100 pages or more, could write
a tutorial describing his/her methods, that
would help.

My own current planned workaround is to process a
single page or two facing pages, add page
numbers manually, save that mini-document in
pdf form, and then use something like pdftk
to combine the pages. This will exacerbate
the other serious flaw in Scribus,
excessively long pdf files. 

As Yul Brinner said in "The King and I", "Is
a puzzlement."     
  
Thoughts?
-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
Book layout, typesetting and Indexing
Free list of books for self-publishers:
http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html