[Scribus] Scribus+OpenBox and more

[Peter Linnell]

On Thursday 18 March 2004 09:09 am, Serban Udrea wrote:
> Hello,
>
> And first of all big thanks to all who work on this very nice piece of
> software.
>
> Now, unfortunatelly I have some problems :-(
>
> 1. I cannot get Scribus to run properly when I use the OpenBox v. 3.1
> window manager. Presently I do not know if it is Scribus or OpenBox,
> because:
>
> a) while with other WMs I have no similar problems
> b) I have no problems with OpenBox and other Qt-applications
>
> If I start Scribus and use OpenBox the main window of the application
> pops up but then nothing  else works. For instance, instead of menus I
> get grey rectangels. Starting Scribus from an xterm window reveals error
> messages like the ones in the attached file.
>
> The next points refer at using Scribus with another WM (e.g. icewm),
> with which it works.
>
> 2. I like to use mm as length units. After setting this, the values on
> the vertical ruler are not set correctly, they are 10 times smaller.
>
> 3. The numbers on the horizontal ruler are never complete. The upper
> part is missing. It looks like they are not redrawn properly after the
> little red arrow passes over.

2 & 3) Which font are you using as default for the GUI ?

Which version of Scribus? - this was fixed a while ago in a previous version.

Have you tried the latest 1.1.6 ?

We have had users discover bugs in a few window managers, mostly enlightenment 
and sawfish.

<snipping from the README in 1.1.6>

"There is a bug in sawfish and enlightenment that creates window ghosting
effect when Tools  palettes are turned on. A simple temporary workaround
is to turn each ghosted Tool palette off and on.

A more permanent workaround for Gnome users is to use metacity. Scribus
has workarounds for some metacity bugs built-in, but the sawfish / 
enlightenmentbug seems to be Qt related."

I'll note Scribus has been carefully checked to make sure the Windowing hints
comply with Qt specs. 
>
> 4. During the resize of a box (for text or image) intermediate positions
> of the box frame are persistent on the screen until I release the mouse
> button and the final box is drawn. This looks very ugly :-( even if it
> is not critical.

Which version do you have?  The latest 1.1.6 has fixes for this - even though 
it is cosmetic.
>
> 5. Scribus seems relativelly slow. E.g. slower than OpenOffice v. 1.1
> Impress when I try to do the same thing: an A0-poster. Actually I
> discovered Scribus while looking for WSYIWYG software to prepare posters
> for conferences under Linux.

Performance  can be a subjective issue. You *can* make A0 posters in Impress, 
but that is not its real purpose in life. Moreover, Impress, while an 
excellent part of OO/SO (it is better in many repsects than Power point IMO), 
is not a true page layout application. 

Impress is geared towards 72-96 DPI screen resolution presentations. 
Scribus can generate 4000 DPI PDF and postscript among many other 
capabilities.

Observations:

Scribus loads in 1/3 the time of OO/Impress on the same hardware.

A fairer comparison for performance would be other DTP apps which have the 
same kinds of capabilities as Scribus. ID2/Illustrator 10 and ID CS are far 
slower on my machine than Scribus.

Hope that helps,
Peter