[Scribus] Page templates and auto text frames

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 23:07 +1100, Peter Zweck wrote:

> I am starting a ~200 page book using Scribus 1.2.1 (rpm package) on
> Mandrake 10.1. I am new to both Scribus and DTP in general, so please
> excuse a few new user questions. Feel free to point me to the right
> place in the docs......
> 
> 1. I want to set up a few types of page templates for chapter start
> pages, general body text etc. I have set up some templates as shown in
> the tutorial, but note that you cannot edit or add text to text frames
> in the document that were created in the page template. Is it possible
> to create a text frame in a page template that is editable?  (to save
> having to create text frames and set up columns 200 times in the document)

Not yet, unfortunately. This is a bit of a FAQ, and clearly something
folks want. For now, your best option may be to do it with a script.

> 2. When you start a new document you can choose to have automatic text
> frames. Can you turn on (or off) this feature after you have created
> your document?

I don't think it can be turned on/off after document creation, no.

> When I close down Scribus it reports a crash due to signal #6. Could
> this account for the trouble I have had getting Scribus to save some
> user preferences (such as autosave)?

Almost certainly. Signal 6 is usually triggered by an assertion failure,
meaning that the app or one of it's libraries noticed something wrong
and aborted the program. Unfortunately, since most distros strip all
debugging symbols out of their packages it may not be possible to tell
why it is crashing.

It might be possible to get some useful information anyway. If you like
you can try running scribus under a debugger and asking for an error
report when it crashes. To do this, open a terminal and run:

	gdb scribus

gdb will print a copyright notice, and probably a long series of
complaints about 'no symbols' then drop you to a prompt like:

	(gdb)

>From there, just type:

	run

and press enter. Scribus should start up like normal, though a little
slower. Try quitting. If you get the crash, Scribus will freeze instead
of displaying the normal error dialog. When it freezes, go to the
terminal you ran it from, and you should notice you're back at the gdb
prompt. The text above probably looks a bit like this:

	Program received signal SIGABRT, Abort.
	[Switching to Thread -1208076576 (LWP 8264)]
	0x008184de in memcpy () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
	(gdb)

If you can paste that text, from "Program received" to "(gdb)", and send
that off, that'd be very helpful. If you type:

	bt

and press enter at the "(gdb)" prompt and send that off too, that'd be
even more useful. With luck the program won't actually be stripped, only
a non-debug build, so there may be some useful information in there.

--
Craig Ringer