[Scribus] Quark user's questions

[Ivan Blagdan]

Craig Ringer wrote:

>On Thu, 2005-01-27 at 09:10 +0100, Craig Bradney wrote:
>
>  
>
>>From where I see it, its not relative to the window or the page.. its a 
>>number. If you want to increase it.. you press up, if you want to decrease 
>>it, press down.
>>    
>>
>
>Agreed. It's not something I have a real issue with personally (my
>difficulties with the co-ordinate system were related to the scripter,
>not using the GUI), but I can see why folks might be confused.
>
>Personally, I want to find whoever thought that having the (0,0) origin
>of the window system be the top left was a good idea, and hurt them a
>lot ;-) . My guess is they picked that because of terminals and line
>printers... but the Cartesian system uses (0,0) as bottom left and has
>for a just a *tad* longer than computers have been about. It only got
>worse when PostScript entered the picture.
>  
>
First of all hi, new to the list. Just started taking interest again in 
Scribus, which i tried some time before. To give you a general idea of 
my perspective I'll just say I'm an Indesign user.

<rant>
Now, as with most other professions, DTP is pretty much about producing 
things in a quick and painless manner, sometimes true sometimes not. You 
make brochures, books, all sorts paper based design using software such 
as Scribus, Quark or Indesign... All of which have their own perks and 
ways of doing what you want them to do. What I do not want to have in 
such a software, that i depend a great deal on, is inconsistency and 
illogical maneuvers that you have to pull of for you to have the things 
work, i could use ms word for that. Scribus has a lot of work put into 
it, and a lot work ahead of it... it would be a shame to skip the 
details that matter and have the users just close his eyes on this bit 
and that bit - then say its a professional piece of software that "just 
works", its just that you can't do ______ like that. The thing you can't 
do is, more often than not, the thing you need. Thats why I'm not using 
Linux just yet for my work.
</rant>

Following that, i noticed that Indesign has implemented a very nice way 
of handling the relativity of X and Y axis. It has a nice little icon 
that makes it easy to set handles of the object on 8 + 1 points of a 
rectangle and calculates all the other values from there.

I do a fair bit of developing web applications (my part is the usability 
and GUI designs, work flow and such) and theres one thing that 
programmers don t get, having a user friendly system means 
obscuring(relative term in the means of amount and ways) the technical 
details about a certain platform that the user doesnt have to know 
about. Example; DTP people for the most part dont need to know that the 
Color profile converts first to LAB or other absolute color systems 
before converting to their profile, they just click convert. Parallel 
would be that they dont need to know postscript coordinate systems or 
the hows an whys of the program. It hinders usability and most 
important, in DTP, creativity.

Anyway, if a translation of docs to Croatian would be welcome, i'm 
willing to give a hand to the Scribus community.

Excuse the long post and bad grammar/spelling,
Keep up the good work,

    Ivan