[Scribus] OS X port

[Kevin Walzer]

I certainly understand about the issues of family and time. Having said 
that, I will be beginning to work with Scribus more fully later this 
fall and, if time allows, would be willing to do some testing, or at 
least submit bug reports based on my daily work. I don't code; I'm a 
book publisher. Right now I am working on getting Scribus re-built 
under the latest version of Fink, since the upgrades have broken some 
of my packages (even though I'm still on Jaguar). I will likely be 
upgrading to Panther later this fall, probably after Apple releases 
10.3.1 to fix bugs, and will surely have to build Scribus again at that 
point. So, I will work with the latest version that I can from the Fink 
port, and will let you know what I am able to do; I would like to 
contribute in some way because I believe a robust open source (but 
non-TeX) alternative to InDesign and Quark is desperately needed.

On Monday, October 27, 2003, at 08:46  PM, Peter Linnell wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 10:58, Kevin Walzer wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm using Scribus 1.1 via Fink (OS X 10.2.8)and am looking forward to
>> putting it through the paces in a production environment. So far the
>> results are promising (my earlier experiences, documented in my blog, 
>> were
>> not as good and reflected my own steep learning curve with X11). I'm 
>> still
>> curious, though, about the prospects for a fully-native OS X port. I 
>> know
>> that Benjamin Reed of KDE/Fink did a "proof-of-concept" port earlier 
>> this
>> summer, but it wasn't particularly functional, and I don't think he 
>> plans
>> to update it.
>
>> Does the Scribus team have anything official in the works?
>> It would be nice to be able to access all OS X fonts and run the 
>> program
>> without the overhead of X11. Not a big deal, but just thought I'd ask.
>
> Paul Johnson, one of the developers has spent some time with a borrowed
> Mac and worked on getting it to build with the GPL version of Qt for
> OSX. I know he had some success, exactly what I do not know.
>
> There are still some issues which Paul is working on and has just been
> committed to cvs some patches for big-endian issues.
>
> The major hold back is really none of the devel team have full time
> access to late model Mac. I expect to have access to one later this 
> year
> for testing in a pre-press environment, but I don't code, just docs and
> testing. The other is just pure developer time. All of us on the team
> are married with families and full time jobs, so there are just so many
> minutes in a day.
>
> As for font access, you should be able to point Scribus to where ever
> you have fonts and it should find them with the new font code.In 
> Scribus
> 1.1.1+, Qt is no longer used for font handling, just freetype2. One of
> my linux boxes is a dual boot Win2k box and it was trival to point
> Scribus at /mnt/c/psfonts in font preferences and they show up.
>
> That said, patches and testing would be most welcome. Soon there will 
> be
> new code in Scribus to help debugging.
>
> Regards,
> Peter
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
---

Kevin Walzer, Ph.D.
Editor
WordTech Communications -- A New Paradigm of Poetry
http://www.wordtechcommunications.com
http://www.kevin-walzer.com
mailto:kevin at wordtechweb.com