[Scribus] Scribus broke my Printing System!

[Russ]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: [Scribus] Scribus broke my Printing System!
Date: Friday 10 December 2004 02:02 pm
From: Russ <russbucket at centurytel.net>
To: davecs at ntlworld.com

On Friday 10 December 2004 01:26 pm, Dave Spagnol wrote:

> Though a reboot got it going again. (Restarting cups didn't).
>
> OK here's what happened:
>
> I wanted to do a "letter from Santa" to my 5 year old nephew. I had a nice
> Christmas Tree in *.wmf format so I used OpenOffice Draw to convert it to
> SVG. Plus Santa's head.
>
> Trouble with importing SVG graphics into Scribus is that you cannot adjust
> them (at least I can't work out how to). So I re-did the Tree, this time as
> *.eps. I put it into a Picture Frame, made it full page, and turned the
> opacity down to 10% to make it a background wash.
>
> I then put Santa's head in the top left corner, used "Font in a Red Suit"
> for a Headline "Merry Christmas from Santa Claus" and two other fonts.
> Hobbit SF (like Hobo only bolder) and AvantGarde one to top and tail the
> letter, the other for the text. It looked great.
>
> Then I tried to print it. Nothing! I tried exporting it to PDF and loaded
> it with KPDF, and the background tree showed as 100% opaque! I then tried
> to do a print preview inside Scribus, got a Sig 11 crash. I then imported
> the PDF into Acroread for Linux 5, printed it and again, nothing. Tried
> printing a test page, nothing.
>
> I rebooted, tried printing in Acroread again, this time it printed but no
> background Tree at all! I tried Acroread in Windows 98 this time the
> background tree was there, but a few letters from the headline went
> missing. FInally I reloaded the letter into Scribus, converted the Headline
> text to paths, exported as PDF again, tried printing through Acroread
> again, no background. Tried printing through Scribus again, broke printing
> system again. Tried preview again, crashed again.
>
> Finally went into Windows 98 and printed it correctly via Acroread!
>
> Obviously there are problems with the hpijs/foomatic/cups drivers for my
> printer (HP3820). But it seems that the output from Scribus is too
> sophisticated for external programs to deal with, and even for its own
> print preview to deal with. Possibly the solution would be to output the
> file in some sort of bitmap form, or fade colours in the output rather than
> rely on printer drivers to do it.
>
> I tried all of the above even loading up the Stable 1.2 version to import
> my document and try to print it, same results every time!
>
> By the way, I didn't really want to make the graphic transparent, I just
> wanted to fade it but I couldn't see a way of doing it!
>
> Dave
>
> (PS don't want to complain too loudly, it's the only time I've caught
> Scribus out ever since you got to version 1.1.7)


Dave; Do you have a windows enviroment for Scribus or Linux? The way I found
to handle the wmf files is to bring the art up in Publisher or other MS
program, copy it to the clipboard then file\copy clipboard from the XNView
screen. it into XNView (free program @ http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/ ).
Then I save it as xxx.png. I them am able to use GIMP to change the size, etc
to fit my scribus picture. It worked for my Christmas cards. I'm trying to
get rid of MS but several things prevent me from totally doing that now. One
of them is the wmf files. There is an XNview for Linux but it does not have a
copy clipboard option and cut/paste does not work for this.

Don't know if this will help but I gave up with the Office Draw approach.

--
Russ

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-- 
Russ