[scribus] Some feedback

Tue Oct 10 17:43:52 UTC 2017

Dear list,

we just had two rather intense weeks, doing another edition of our
magazine - now in Scribus 1.5.3 on OpenSuse, latest LEAP.

Working with the "new" 1.5.3 text engine is still awesome for me, all
tone marks stay where they belong.

We are not mourning the (temporary?) loss of DejaVu, since there are
slowly more fonts emerging which can handle our language. Fira Sans is a
lovely gift to West Africa. We even purchased a not-expensive commercial
hand-writing font now, to write in our cartoon speech bubbles. (It does
not have bold yet, but we hacked it a little, where somebody is yelling.)

I like:

- Scribus and the new F4 test-properties window

- layers and the new option to select across layers (for a few special
moments when fixing something)

- all the help we are getting for justified text, not least those
optical margin thingies and certain tricks with spacing and character width

- styles and line styles; we had overlooked them too much in the past,
but styles help a lot

- the fact that we can do "math" in many boxes where numbers are entered
(properties) and that we can change the "corner of reference" of frames
and objects which is super helpful for aligning and positioning stuff

- keyboard short-cuts seem to work better than before, used them a lot
this time round

- the little insert-character window, where we can keep some of our
special punctuation stuff in different fonts

We tried a new approach: Rather than several users working on a massive
20 page (many illustrations mind you) A3 document, we split the work
according to articles of 1 or 2 pages each. We worked from the same
"template" document which I had made and never attempted to combine in
the end.
	We just exported separate PDF files for proof-reading and printing.
Overall this approach has been faster and cleaner, than trying to move a
big document (via collect for output) between different users.

We moved away from the master-pages, because in our magazine many pages
have their unique style (journalism versus ads, etc.) and very few
elements (category, page number) exist across all pages. Master pages
are a good concept, but in our context, there meant little help (page
numbers) and much hassle.

In the end I tried to combine 14 individual PDF exports - with Adobe
Acrobat DC - into one PDF file and it was an ugly mess. Probably more
style trouble. I found that vectorizing all fonts helped, and files did
only marginally get bigger. Because of our "exotic language", we have a
habit anyway of vectorizing most of our output anyway.

If I had two free wishes, and knowing that at the moment a focus is on
the GUI, I would give this feedback; not as criticism, but to make
Scribus even nicer:

1. During work, there were several occasions, where we could have used
some all-column-magic on the layers-window: We would like a box at the
top of each column (see/hide, print/not-print) where we could toggle all
of our many layers ON or OFF at once.

We need many layers because of complex pages, they help to put texts on
top of illustrations and to keep larger-size headings away from the main
article-text fames etc.

2. During our work, we have need for several standard PDF export
settings which we keep using in rounds: For proofing in our office, for
local printing in A3 on laser printer, for publishing on the web, etc.

A document might "remember" the last settings I had, but we would need
to be able to store five different "settings" by name across all
documents and them apply them depending on need.

I tried spying how Scribus is storing the information of my last export
and possibly to hack it, but could only find the data for the pre-flight
settings, not for my own personal export-settings.

I should not end on something negative, but I still hate the fact that I
have to make two clicks in the text-editor-window to just open the style
selector next to a paragraph (because there is nothing else to do there
one click is enough - mouse-over would be even better).

So I better end with something nice: We have used Scribus now for
several years and it keeps getting better and also more powerful. Apart
from some style trouble - which we managed to work around - we had no
crashes in two intense weeks of layout. We used many tricks and did play
with titles and frames. It feels that each year we can focus more on the
content and less on Scribus. Thank you all developers and all on this
list who keep giving help and ideas.

And thank you JLuc for your recent help on copy & paste. This is
something new to us, since we used to work our magazine in one big file.
More copy and paste this time, but only one problem. I guess it helps
that we store most of our "useful stuff" in that self-made-template
which we are using to start each new article anyway.

Martin

-- 
ZASKE Martin
responsable GʊGʊ
BP 50 - Bassila - Bénin
tel GʊGʊ 66.66.11.11
tel pers 97.44.62.95