[Scribus] Report on publishing with scribus

[Malte Cornils]

Hi...

I've recently finished publishing a campus magazine (the "Quappe") with 
scribus. I'd like to share my problems with that, maybe it's helpful. Of 
course, scribus is mentioned in the credits ("Impressum") :-).

It's a non-professional work for a non-commercial political campus 
organization, and it's in German. It is currently being distributed for free 
(2000 of them).

http://www.usta.de/StuPa/GAL/quappe/dezember_03/quappe.pdf
http://www.usta.de/RefAk/Aussen/privat/quappe_scribus.sla (w/o images and 
fonts, document under GPL)
http://www.quappe.org/

1.) Spacing around images had to be done via text areas around them. A setting 
for image frames for text distances would be great.

2.) On the template pages: Alt-# was documented somewhere for "insert page 
number". Not documented was that this works only up to page 9. For the 
correct behaviour for pages ranging from 0-99, you have to press Alt-# twice. 
This means, however, that from 0-9 there is too much space in front of the 
number (since 9 gets rewritten as empty-space 9). Like for protected spaces, 
there could be an insert special-menu somewhere so you do not have to go 
hunting through the docs.

3.) Page 3, right coloumn: Ge- schichte; there is lots of empty space after 
the Ge-, this should either not happen or scribus should warn the user (like 
"underfull hbox" in LaTeX)

4.) Page 5, left coloumn: Gesetzesd- schungel; incorrect hyphenation.

5.) I have to blame myself for not choosing a text style where the spacing 
after each paragraph is compatible with normal text (Page 1, after the first 
paragraph in the right coloumn, lines begin differently at left and right 
coloumns). Vertical alignment to manually correct this would be nice even 
when you do this correctly.

6.) Exporting this to PDF yields a PDF which can not be read in ghostscript 
(Acrobat and xpdf manages this fine). Error is:
Error: /typecheckGNU Ghostscript 7.07: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
 in --length--
Operand stack:
   --dict:5/5(L)--   Fo4S0   10   --dict:9/9(L)--   --dict:9/9(L)--   695421   
--dict:9/9(L)--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   256   
--nostringval--
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   
--nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   
--nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   
%oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   .runexec2   --

7.) When putting a word in italics (a different font) somewhere in a paragraph 
which has a style assigned to it, and going to Edit/Styles... and pressing 
save immediately after, the customization is lost. This should be a bug. In 
Pagemaker, you could assign a style preserving manual changes or not 
preserving them. The current global non-preserving assign is rather ugly.

8.) Single lonely lines at the end of a text box are possible, also at the 
beginning of a new one ("Schusterjungen" etc). This should optionally be 
prevented, or warned about. If scribus could slightly change the kerning 
automatically like LaTeX does it, it would be possible.

9.) Ctrl-Cursor selections is already on the wishlist - very useful obviously.

10.) I needed to have the A5 quappe for printing after downloading it, but A5 
with a specific order on A4 pages for prepress (16 and 1, 2 and 15, ...) and 
also mirrored. scribus could not do this in that combination. I used pdfpages 
LaTeX module for that (and a local modification called  pdfreverse which does 
the same thing, just mirrored).

11.) With 75 dpi, the resulting PDF is rather large. I have a distinct feeling 
Acrobat Distiller does a better job when producing for Internet distribution.

Those have been my problems when doing the layout (really major are 1, 3, 7). 
The story editor is very very very useful - without it, it wouldn't have been 
possible. All other bugs I've had have now been fixed in the latest CVS (!). 
Thank you!

-Malte #8-)