[Scribus] Which is the "recommend" release?

[Peter Linnell]

In addition to Paul's comments, here is some additional info:
On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 05:36, Sebastian R?der wrote:
> Hello,
> I' d like to layout our school magazin with scribus. This is my second try and 
> I had some problems at the first one. I used different releases of scribus  
> 0.9x and finaly scribus 1.0.1. The main problems were the bad text output on 
> screen and the "crashing-every-5-minutes" behavior of scribus, if I worked on 
> larger projects (around 34 pages).
> 
> Please don`t get me wrong, i don`t want to criticize the developer of scribus. 
> I just want to find, which release may be the best for me? 1.1.0. brings the 
> improvements concerning font-rendering but is still a devel release 
> (unstable?) And what about 1.1.1. ? Is this more stable than 1.1.0 ? The new 
> features might be nice, but  are not that important for the layout of the 
> school magazin, though. At the moment, I'd prefer the 1.1.0, because of the 
> 1.1.1. problems when I wan to open older scribus docs. Maybe the most 
> important feature ( I did`t dealt whith at the moment) is the high quality 
> pre-press pdf export. This should work fine.

I use the CVS code daily and overall 1.1.x is far more stable than
earlier versions. The performance is much better on modest hardware. In
my opinion, it is worth the trouble of migrating docs to the new format
and font naming scheme.

Hints:

Make sure your printer has the pre-press.pdf so they understand how to
handle Scribus PDF's. You can find it on the scribus.org.uk site. I test
the PDF output almost daily with DTP tools like Pit Stop Pro 5 and full
Acrobat, Callas PDFInspektor and Markzware's Flight Check Pro, as well a
EFI Fiery RIP.

If you printer has Acrobat 5.0.5/Pit Stop Pro 5.0x, there is a bug in
Acrobat which prevents parsing Scribus PDF files. Fixes:

1) Do a "Save as" in Acrobat with Optimize for Web enabled. This
"linearizes" the file. Then, Acrobat can parse Scribus PDF.

2) Use Acrobat 6.0 Pro which does not have this problem.


> What are your recommendations?
> Are there releases planed for the next 2 weeks, which might bring bugfixes and 
> proper stability ? What about CVS - it is normaly the most unstable thing, 
> but it`s also a good possibility for fast bugfixes, isn`t it?
> 
> Sebastian R?der
Other hints:

If possible get the latest GIMP devel 1.3.21 version. You can install
this parallel to Gimp 1.2.x. This has some basic CMYK support and I find
it much easier to use. This is the basis of Gimp 2.0 and is close to
feature freeze and release candidate testing. Very stable for a devel
version.

Getting the correct dpi settings is important for optimal photo quality.
Too high a resolution can be just as bad as too little with newsprint.
Your printer can guide you there.

Here is my short list of Linux DTP tools:

1. GsView 4.4 - Use for previewing ps and eps files.

2. pstoedit 3.3 - This is a command line converter, which can be used by
to convert PDF and ps files into SVG via Sketch and Sodipodi. If it
installed correctly GsView can use this as a conversion plug-in.

3. Sodipodi/Sketch - always save from Sodipodi as "plain" SVG if you
import SVG into Scribus. Both export SVG which Scribus can import and
then edit natively.

4. Autotrace/Frontline These are tools to convert bitmap back to vector.
Sodipodi can use this as a plug-in to import.

Wherever possible, keep line art and other drawings native vector and
import them into Scribus as SVG. The print quality is excellent and it
keeps file sizes reasonably small.

Feel free to post here other questions/issues.

Regards,
Peter