[Scribus] creation of complex drawings

[Gregory Pittman]

I decided to tackle a little project with Scribus to try out some things 
I had not yet done yet.  This involved combining the text of a 
presentation with generated slides physically aligned with the text.  
You can find this at ftp://216.120.240.235/presentation_truncated.pdf

The one I am referring to here is called 'presentation_truncated.pdf' -- 
let me add that this is not my material, so I can't release it for 
anyone else to publish on the web or elsewhere.  The material comes from 
Boston University's website as some webcasts being made freely available 
to the public.  They have some MS Word documents available for download 
which are just transcripts of some presentations made a different times, 
but without the accompanying slides shown at these presentations.  
http://www.bu.edu/cre/webcast/output/thankyou.html

Here are some notes about the experience of creating these pages:

1. Several aspects are quite easy with Scribus.  The text body was 
simple enough -- I converted the MS Word document to .txt, then imported 
into Scribus. I found that it was much easier to generate enough/more 
than enough blank pages with text frames, then importing the text and 
doing the linking. For some reason, trying to append pages when I ran 
out and then doing the linking didn't always work or work easily -- one 
problem is not knowing how many pages and frames to generate.  
Generating the slide miniatures when they consisted of only text or text 
and simple graphics (such as arrows) was quite easy, such as on page 1.  
Story Editor does a good job with these slide miniatures for editing the 
text, centering, etc.

2. Story Editor is challenging with a large amount of text linking over 
several pages -- it always takes you to the top of the linked frames, 
and as we all know, it will frequently change font, size and other 
features. Once you mess up the font, it takes some repetitive work over 
several pages one at a time to straighten it out again -- select all 
doesn't go beyond the current frame.  When editing text not using Story 
Editor, I had to be vigilant to make sure the text frame was highlighted 
and that the Properties toolbox was not to keep from changing something 
in Properties.  The different behaviors with Move mode and Insert mode 
can be frustrating.

3. The schematic diagrams on pages 2 to 6 were not so difficult to set 
up individually, but as you can see, and as would commonly be the case, 
several were repetitive in part, with additions/deletions/minor editing. 
These frames are, of course, made up of numerous elements -- the main 
text frame, superimposed small text frames with or without outlines, 
individual arrows and lines and a few pseudo-compound structures like 
the right angle arrows on page 5, which are each a combined Scribus 
built-in arrow and a bezier curve fattened up and aligned to match the 
arrow.

4. Page 5 also represents an example of a *very* handy feature of 
Scribus -- multiple duplication with a settable X and Y displacement.  
This allowed me to generate the figure at the top, then Multiple 
Duplicate the common elements for all the subsequent figures below -- 
swee-ee-eet! Also nice that it saves your settings for displacement!  
Unfortunately, when you want to do something similar from one page to 
another, such as from the similar diagrams on pages 2, 3, 4 and 6 -- 
Scribus can help with Copy and Paste, but it's laborious, not only do 
you Copy > Paste (or Duplicate > Cut > Paste, which is what I usually 
did, because sometimes Ctrl-C didn't work, and with Ctrl-D and Ctrl-X 
there is visual feedback as to whether it works or not) each element 
individually, but the pasting always goes to the same coordinates on the 
page pasted to, so then you need to Move each element individually.  
This is obviously something where the promised Grouping feature will be 
a godsend (or is it Franz-send?). Perhaps a visual clipboard feature off 
the side would help, as some have suggested.

5. On page 3, I made use of the columns feature with the slide at the 
bottom; it was simple enough to enter the information in Story Editor, 
but subsequent editing is a little tricky. Note that I changed the font 
features on the top word of each column -- you cannot select that word 
in the second column in Scribus when it is displayed as two columns -- 
selecting with the mouse just doesn't work. You have to change the 
dimensions of the frame so that it is over in the first column, select 
it, change the font, then resize the frame.

6. 'presentation_truncated.pdf' is a smaller version of the 
'presentation_whiteneck.pdf' that is also at that ftp address -- what is 
extra in 'whiteneck' is just more pages of text. When files get to this 
size (this is 14 pages), Scribus gets very s-l-u-g-g-i-s-h with 
everything: scrolling, editing text (outside of Story Editor).  I'm not 
sure why Scribus is so much slower than Acrobat with scrolling or 
jumping to a particular page.

All in all, a good learning experience -- time-consuming, but the end 
results excellent.

Gregory Pittman