[Scribus] [Newbie] Ready for production use?

[Adrianna Pinska]

Hello,

I used Scribus four times to do the layout of a student magazine, and
it worked pretty well -- it was as good as a commercial program, once
I had figured out its quirks.  You should just remember to save
frequently, since it occasionally crashes.  I also agree about the
size issue; the magazine usually goes up to 30 pages or so, and by the
end the program gets quite slow -- I've had to wait for several
seconds for it to finish redrawing.

I think that also depends on the complexity of the document, however
-- how many linked boxes of text you have, how much text you have that
wraps around picture boxes with complicated shapes, and so on.  If all
you have is a lot of single boxes (like in a calendar) it might not be
so bad.  You can just split it into smaller documents, though.

(I once worked on an a7 booklet which was to be printed on a4, cut out
and assembled.  So I had a document with only eight pages, but each of
the pages was sub-divided into eight textboxes and they were
interlinked in an arrangement which spanned multiple pages, going back
and forth.  The performance was *horrible*; I think I had to link the
pages first and put the text in afterwards, because if I linked the
boxes with the text already in them the program became unusably
unresponsive.  This is why I'm guessing it's not just the number of
pages which is a factor.  This is an extreme case, though; I've only
had slightly irritating slow-downs with more normal 30+ page
documents.)

In summary -- go for it; at worst you'll need to print it in three
parts (or re-assemble three parts into a single document).

Adrianna
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