[Scribus] is it just me?

[Craig Ringer]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 11:00 +0100, Peter Nermander wrote:
> > Try using the Story Editor to edit text, I suppose you're trying to edit
> > it directly on the canvas but AFAIK that's not the right way (TM) in
> > Scribus, but sure this can be done so if you have time :)
> 
> If one is for example writing a big heading (think of making a poster for a
> sale, then you want the word SALE in big letters) it feels like an
> unecessary step to have to go to the story editor to enter something like 10
> letters...
> 
> I would very much appreciate a "draft" mode where the text rendering is
> faster (maybe even a setting like "Don't render text below xx points").

It'd be cool, but might be harder than it seems given that I certainly
wouldn't want any such draft mode to have line breaks, hyphenation, etc
in the wrong places... it'd kind of defeat the purpose of editing in-
frame. Given that, I'm not sure how much would be gained by drawing
quick-n-dirty glyphs, which is I suspect really all you could do.

That said, text frames currently redraw, and IIRC reflow, all the text
in the frame whenever they're modified. For some cases - especially
writing in the frame - it'd be useful to only redraw text *after* the
modified text (given that the text before will not change when redrawn).
I'm not sure how practical that'd be right now - the code for page item
drawing is a bit too involved for me to even hazard a guess.

Alternately, maybe some sort of glyph caching magic would be helpful.
Again, though, that's beyond my present knowledge.

> (Ok, I'm using very slow machines, but I can live with that it takes 10
> minutes to export to a PDF (since I can have a cup of coffee while that
> happens) but it's a lot more frustrating to have to wait 15-30 seconds for
> the canvas to redraw just because I adjusted a heading. OTOH I think there
> is some patch now preventing complete redraw when doing a small change?)

I hacked out a quick one for deselection - it only addresses the
specific case of the whole canvas being redrawn when you de-select an
item or group of items.

If there's anything more in that vein floating around, I'd be very
interested to hear about it.

By the way, text frame redrawing due to editing already only redraws
that text frame. To test this, just create a text frame that takes up
most of an A4 page, fill the large frame with sample text, then create a
small second frame that doesn't overlap the large one. You should find
that typing into the small frame is snappy and responsive.

-- 
Craig Ringer