[Scribus] Quark user's questions

[Peter Linnell]

On Thursday 27 January 2005 10:48, Ivan Blagdan wrote:
<snip>
>
> 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.
>
Very much agreed. 

I think one place where Scribus shines in UI, is the PDF exporter. I find it a 
very user friendly way to generate all kinds of different PDF's without 
offering lots of technical options which can confuse users. No, its not 
perfect, but it has sensible defaults. It also does not send you to the 
manual trying to understand the settings every time you export.

I do DTP/IT support and other DTP apps PDF export options are often what I 
call "Dialogs from hell". 


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

Most certainly another language would be welcome. 

You can find the translators howto here:
http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&sm=translationhowto&page=translation_howto

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

Cheers,

Peter