[Scribus] Again with a Newbie Question

[Martin Costabel]

Paraplegic Racehorse wrote:
[]
>>> On your level of newbie-ness :-) I would suggest that you type
>>>
>>>   open-x11 scribus
>>>   
>> Nope. I tried that and it doesn't work so that's bad advice for him.
>>  
>>
> Correct. One way is to start Apple X11 (look in 
> /Applications/Utilities). Then, in the terminal that opens, type in 
> '/sw/bin/scribus &'; OR menu: Applications/Customize... and edit one of 
> the blank lines with Name: Scribus, Command: /sw/bin/scribus

Now this is really bad advice :-) If you do this, you have good chances 
that your PATH environment variable does not contain /sw/bin, otherwise 
it would not have been necessary to give the complete path to 
/sw/bin/scribus, it would have been sufficient to type "scribus".

Now if this PATH is incorrect, scribus will not find its helper 
applications, like gs for example, and you will get errors afterwards 
that are more difficult to understand and to debug.

The right way to do it in the Applications menu of Apple's X11 is to put

source /sw/bin/init.sh ; scribus

there. Similarly if you start scribus from an xterm command line.

Actually, my mistake (and you are making it, too) was to assume that 
newbies would automatically have Apple's X11 installed. If they had, 
they could use the "open-x11" command that comes with Apple's X11 and 
that avoids having to start X11.app separately and to worry about 
environment variables.

It turns out that newbies nowadays often have a broken X11 installation 
that they get from installing openoffice or some other similar garbage. 
It's Apple's schizophrenic stand about open source that is at fault, of 
course, in that they still don't really acknowledge X11 as an integral 
part of any installation of MacOSX.

> Better, yet, he can get AquaScribus and open scribus the "Mac way". Go 
> to http://www.wordtech-software.com/aquascribus.html and download the 
> launcher. This will first launch X11 and then Scribus. It will also 
> associate scribus files with the launcher so double-clicking a .sla file 
> will launch and open in Scribus.

Note that for AquaScribus to work, you also need to have Apple's X11 
installed. So if open-x11 doesn't work, AquaScribus won't work either.

-- 
Martin