[Scribus] Prefs>Miscellaneous ...

[Christoph Schäfer]

Hi Louis,

let me try to sort things out a bit:

Am Mittwoch, 15. Februar 2006 22:04 schrieb Louis Desjardins:

>
> May I open a parenthesis right here. What I have to say is just bit
> aside of this discussion... At the same time, we are right at the core
> of it. Sorry if this sounds paradoxal!
>
> IMO, instead of the default font for a text frame it's a style we need
> here. A style that should be edited in the Style menu and set there as a
> default.
>
> Also, do all elements in the Prefs really belong there? Hyphenation and
> Typography (including baseline grid) settings could be part of Paragraph
> Styles. Thus, taken away from that dialog.

I am right with you here. However there are already a lot of RFEs in the bugs. 
I think Scribus should follow the OO.o approach (and probably go beyond), 
which means offering styles for almost everything: pages, paragraphs, 
characters, image frames, text frames, tables, tocs, indices, lists, 
footnotes, lines, colours ...

The consequence would be two leaner prefs dialogs.

I think it's Riku who is currently working on a new style dialog. Maybe he can 
tell us his thoughts on it.
>
> And are all elements in the Doc setup need to be there? What about PDF
> export and Preflight Verifier?

Agree, the PDF settings are quite likely unnecessary here, except, perhaps, 
PDF transparency. This could be moved to somewhere else (as in 1.2?). 
Preflight verifyer must be configured somewhere, so why not here?


>
> Back to the basic, if you allow!
>
> 1. I could not find what prevented the printing of off-margins elements.
> It was hidden into Miscellaneous. Could be just a bad wording case. This
> is the reason why I posted initially. Not even sure of what this became
> now! ;-)

Printing is a very special case. First, the printing dialogs may vary 
extremely from system to system. Even under Linux it makes a difference if 
CUPS is installed or not. How to do this platform agnostic, I'm not sure. 
Quark is offering "printing styles", so will this be the way out? I have no 
answer yet, but if one thinks about printing styles, it should be done better 
than in Quark.

>
> 2. Prefs are there to set the way you *generally* want to work. So I
> clearly understand that this is why we have this 2-head monster (joking
> here...) : it happens from time to time that you *particularly* need a
> different settings... So enters Document setup. What I think is wrong
> here it the 2 are so similar... and they go by different names, and the
> interface is the same... Every ingredient for confusion. Confused me
> anyway and even after all this discussion (not over yet!) and so many
> trips to one an the other, I still am not sure of what is where and
> where I am. "Confusion will be my epitaph"... (!)

Maybe, if both dialogs underwent some cleaning and are properly named, some 
confusion will disappear. Maybe ;)
>
> 3. Although I can deal with new ways, I am still not sure of what is
> wrong with the Quark approach. There is only one place to modify Prefs,
> in the Prefs dialog. This doesn't confuse me or any of my staff. We
> generally hit the "Keep document settings" button when opening a
> previously created document. If something has to be changed there, we
> fully know what we're doing.
>
> 4. The Prefs, by the way, is something we barely never open again,
> except to modify settings that affect the typography :
> superscript/subscript settings. Again, this settings belongs to Style,
> imsho. If QXP and ID are lousy on this one, what should we be?! :-)

See above. I already filed a bug report on this point a few weeks ago.

>
> 5. I am again changing my mind (for now! always ready to hear some more
> ideas) :
> A) If we want 2 dialogs
> ? *no* check box but a clear warning topping each dialog and saying just
> what you can expect to happen after hitting the OK button.
> ? New labelling, under the same overall menu (Edit?)

100 % agreed!

> B) Otherwise, let's keep it as it was in 1.2 (was it?) : ? la Quark.
> In any case, we can clean-up the tabs, gather stuff into styles and make
> the thing roar!
>
> I would avoid at (almost) all cost duplicating the dialogs. A nice way
> to achieve this is through Styles.

Your turn! The discussion has been very interesting so far. Do I see a 
solution around the corner? :)

Cheers

Christoph