[scribus] skewed text frame & text distances

[ZASKE Martin]

> and i'm not sure that -- as soon as you leave the comfort zone of the
> rectangular frame -- the form of the shape has any consequences on the
> calculation... you just have to calculate it correctly, which is not
> trivial.
> 
> ciao
> a.l.e
> 
> p.s.: i'm all for removing half baked features that are hard to use
> and not really essential to scribus... but i'm really in
> the minority here...



Fascinating exchange all this. In about 1993 or 1994 I was still
refusing to move our personal newsletters from a typewriter to those
early computers. Because, quoting myself from memory "we could not even
make text flow sideways around (not inside) the shape of a cartoon cow.
On our typewriter we managed to pull many stunts, maybe not pretty but
our personal style.

These days we can. Count your blessings. People who leave the comfort
zones and who use skewed text (I cannot even spell that), can also learn
those workarounds, like the one Greg worked out and shared. There should
be a health warning, for beginners, not to try Scribus without this
mailing-list...

The fact that I can now use almost any shape and even turn it into a
text frame is awesome. And each user will have different ideas what an
aesthetic test-distance should be, very much depending on context,
colours etc.

So in summary, it is always somewhat difficult to find out how to do
"exotic" things in Scribus or to even find where certain things are
hidden. But in the last few years we have never hit any "cannot do with
Scribus" for our humble publications. Nod to the developers.



chos
By the way, I finally had some time to finish the export-as-bitmap
script late last night for our production machine. Seems the syntax to
handle file names or rather to save to relative paths and file names is
somewhat different between Windows and Linux. It also finally turned
into two separate scripts for colour and b/w output, but working fine
and directly accessible for my team by Scribus-menu. Scribus is getting
better for us each year. The team will love this time saver and can
focus more on layout and design for our proverbs. More subscribers each
week.

fwiw

Martin