[Scribus] A few annoying problems

[Peter Linnell]

On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 17:30, Carol Kankelborg wrote:
> I have come across a few annoying problem with scribus and I would 
> like to know if there
> is a simple way to work around them.  I am coming from a 
> word-processing mindset, so
> I may just have faulty expectations.
> 
> First,  I have a number of lines which are of the following form:
> 
> Song............................................................Name 
> of Performer
> 

> I have them set up as a block paragraph style and I put in enough 
> dots to push the "Name of Performer"
> all the way to the right.  When I quit out of the document and reopen 
> it, extra dots are
> added to some of these lines, seemingly randomly, so the text on the 
> page no longer looks as I want
> it to.  Is there some way to keep this from happening?  I can't find 
> tabs anywhere in scribus.  Am I
> missing them?  Is there some other way to get the same effect other 
> than the way I've done it?
> 

This might be a bug, but I did find left alignment works better for me
with this type of text. I found a related issue with some cvs code which
might be relevant. Stay tuned..

> 
> Second, if I take a paragraph, assign a style to it, then change some 
> of the text in that paragraph,
> for instance make it smaller, that change goes away if I reopen the 
> Edit Styles dialog, make changes
> to a different style, and save.

This is normal behavior. What is happening is your defined styles are
over riding locally applied styles. When saving the styles from the
palette, they are being applied to all the text. In DTP, at least what I
find is often all the styles for a document are created in advance or
via a template. In production work flow this is a huge time saver and a
necessity for consistent output. 

Analogy:

DTP - you "pour" text into pre-defined styles and templates.
WP - type it first, then pretty up the look.

Once you get used to thinking about styles in advance it can greatly
speed up document formatting and provides a consistent look. 

> Related to the above problem, is there some way to include some text 
> styling when you
> "Get Text" from a text file.  For instance, if I have a book title in 
> some text that I want to
> put in italics, do I have to "Get" the text then put the book title 
> in italics 

Yes. 
> or can I somehow
> flag the text beforehand so it is automatically italicized when I 
> pull it into Scribus?

Not yet, that would require "tagging" or having an import filter that
understands rtf for example. 

Hope that helps,
Peter