[Scribus] Initial impressions: Scribus-Aqua

[Kevin Walzer]

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I've successfully built Scribus-Aqua after hacking some portions of my
Fink config files (I have some weird issues that prevent me from
building freetype from source) and used it to lay out an ad for some
forthcoming books from my press. This is a reasonable test project for
Scribus, and I used the same project last summer when trying Scribus
1.1.7, I believe.

The good:

1. Simply put, it's just wonderful to have this available natively on OS
X. Running X11 on the Mac does add some overhead, and Scribus under
Fink, while capable, is a bit sluggish. Getting good open-source
software available *natively* where possible will help improve its
adoption, I believe.

2. Styled text import! Woo-hoo! I successfully imported an
OpenOffice.org Write file. This is such a huge improvement: no more
manually formatting raw ASCII text in Scribus. Even better, with
NeoOffice-J (the Aqua-native fork of OO.org that mixes a little Java to
give native Mac menubars, printing and fonts), I now see an almost
all-Mac-native OSS publishing workflow (the exception here is Gimp.app,
an X11 package, which I can live with because it's an excellent tool).

3. The story editor is much improved: it's *very* usable now. It was a
little rough around the edges last summer and fall, when I last used
Scribus in a production setting.

4. In general, the interface seems more refined and polished.

All in all, Scribus-Aqua feels like a very robust publishing
application. Kudos!

Now, the rough areas:

1. I could not export graphics in PDF. Text exported fine, but graphics
were blank. It was an easy workaround to print a Postscript file and
convert to PDF manually, but Scribus' PDF export is one of its biggest
selling points. Is this an issue with 1.3 CVS, or a Mac bug?

2. Scribus-Aqua saw only a handful of my Mac fonts even when I added the
font paths manually in preferences. I'm aware there are probably some
issues with translating font searches from X11 to Aqua, but I thought Qt
could handle this stuff more gracefully. This isn't a complaint so much
as a query to see if anyone might have ideas for workarounds: would
replacing TrueType fonts with PostScript fonts work better? I just want
to be able to use more than Luxi Sans and Bitstream Charter in my
projects. :-)

3. Having gone through a lot of pain to get the application built, I can
definitely say that having a standalone app bundle with all the
libraries rolled in--or, barring that, a pkg installer--is the way to
go. There aren't a lot of poetry publishers out there who are also
open-source hacker enthusiasts.

Next, a few questions, as I'm a bit rusty on what folks have been doing
with Scribus in a production context:

1. Are there any scripts/plugins/techniques to generate a table of
contests based on text styles?

2. Do template/master pages support automatic page numbering?

3. Can text flow automatically across pages (perhaps with an automatic
text frame setup, which I saw was available in the settings)? i.e. if I
have a sixty-page poetry manuscript that's been formatted in OO.org,
will that import gracefully, or will I need to place text on each page
manually?

Thanks to Andreas and Martin for breaking the build logjam and getting
Scribus patched so it will actually build in the Aqua environment. And
finally, thanks to the Scribus developers!


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Cheers,

Kevin Walzer, PhD
WordTech Software--Open Source Applications and Packages for OS X
http://www.wordtech-software.com
http://www.smallbizmac.com
http://www.kevin-walzer.com
mailto:sw at wordtech-software.com
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