[Scribus] N00b Stupid Table Question

[Christoph Schäfer]

Paraplegic Racehorse schrieb:
> John Jordan wrote:
> 
> 
>>Anyway, I firefoxed my way to scribus.net and read everything 
>>there Not a peep about navigating tables. In fact, tables weren't 
>>even mentioned.
>>
>>So what's the secret?
>> 
>>
> 
> John, I recently ran into this while I was redesigning my business
> cards. I own a taxi company and I place my fare prices dominantly on the
> face of the card with a listing of common charter destinations and their
> prices on the back. Both are in nice, friendly tables that I built in
> Scribus. Since everybody else pretty much told you what Scribus _can't_
> yet do, here's a bit of what it _can_ do with regards to tables.
> 
> 1. A table in scribus is a group of individual text frames. To edit the
> frames, first ungroup them.
> 
> 2. You cannot "tab" your way through the table cells (text frames).
> Instead, you have to select each cell (frame) independantly with the
> mouse. Likewise, to adjust the paragraph style within the frame, you
> must have only one frame selected at a time.
> 
> 3. To resize a column, select every cell (frame) in the column, grab the
> drag handle and drag to your heart's content. Keep in mind that the
> other cells will not automagically align to your new width, so you will
> have to readjust them manually. Same goes for resizing rows.
> 
> 4. To merge cells (frames), delete all but one and resize that to fill
> the left-over void.
> 
> 5. You can simulate a whole table frame by placing a graphic box of the
> same size as your whole table behind the table and editing its line
> attributes. You can play with the line attributes of each frame of your
> table to get a cell-grid, or you can space the cells apart a little and
> mod the fill color of the graphics box below.
> 
> It takes a bit of work, but you can build satisfactory and sophisticated
> tables with the tools already available in Scribus. And don't let these
> other guys tell you otherwise.

Being one of the "other guys", I can tell that I didn't want to diminish 
Scribus' capabilities with respect to tables. But as you mentioned, "it 
takes a bit of work". As I understood, John is using InDesign, and 
compared to ID, Scribus is waaay behind with its table features. In many 
production environments, time consuming workarounds aren't acceptable, 
and the bugs of Scribus tables can cause serious problems.

Yes, one can already do a lot of things with tables, and I really love 
to work with Scribus. It's a great software, but tables definitely need 
some rework to be able to compete with InDesign.

No offence meant :)

Cheers,

Christoph