[Scribus] Discussion: Better image handling in Scribus

[Sebastian Röder]

Hi list,

I worked a lot with Scribus the last days and nights and had some problems 
with the "cropping" function for images. With cropping I mean the possibility 
to manuelly scale an image in a smaller image frame or a frame with different 
ascpect ratio than the image source (e.g. if you have an image with tree 
person and just want to make the man in the middle fit the image frame).

In theory you can do this in the propreties palette with the "image" section - 
here you can scale in horicontal and vertical direction (or both 
simultanisly) and change the part visible in the frame by changing the x and 
y position of the image. But this doesn`t do a good job for me.

First, I recognized that manuell scaling (keeping aspect ratio) sometime leeds 
to bad picture quality on the screen. When this bad quality appears and I 
move the picture inside the border, then I create an pdf of the page I saw 
that the picture in the frame had not possition that is shown in the scribus 
doc (e.g. a centered man has the left hand croped in pdf, not in Scribus 
itself.) Finally I found out that reloading the same picture brings it back 
in good quality and the cropping in Scribus and pdf are in sync now (you can 
see it moving in the Scribus doc in comparison to the old possition).  

Second, I realized that I can not set the x or y possition of my images to 
value smaller than -300mm (and bigger than 300mm?). This means in some cases 
I was not able to make the part of the photo visable, that I want to have 
there. I works (were poor) with changing the x and y possition and the width 
of the frame itself - but that`s hard work.

My wish for the feature: I imagine some kind of preview window when I choose 
the image tab of the propreties tool. This means I`d like to see the full 
image there with a border that has the size of my image frame. Now I want to 
have the possibility to move the border over the image and what`s in is 
visible in the image frame, what`s out is out. (Like the cropping feature for 
digikam print visard if anybody knows).

What are you ideas about it?

I promissed Crag not to write bugreports to the list anymore. This is a 
discussion for all list members to find a proper solution for my problem. 
When we finish discussing I will write something in the tracker.

Regards,
Sebastian