[Scribus] Why do?

[Allen]

avox wrote:

[snip]

> If they sold in the US, the company probably went out of business 20 years
> ago due to expensive lawsuits with buyers who accidentally nailed their cats
> to the garage door... 

Trust me, you can't "accidentally" nail any cat to a door. Too many 
cats, not enough recipes.

[snip]

>> Actually you can do far more than you realize with OO. Not quite up to 
>> GreenStreet, but almost, and in some areas better.
> 
> In my experience you shoot yourself in the foot if you try to do page layout
> from a wordprocessor perspective -- just as if you tried to create a column
> layout with a typewriter. Much better to start with an empty page, design
> a grid layout, then place frames into the grid.

And that is exactly what GreenStreet Publisher has you do. I keep 
mentioning this program, from the UK, because it sold in the US for 
about $60 and came with a decent small manual as Publish-It over ten 
years ago. All it lacks to be quite good is more granularity for 
positioning, better and more numerous master page templates, and a file 
format that is not proprietary. Yeah, there are other things it could do 
better, but I'm guessing that any serious development stopped 7 or 8 
years ago when Microsloth killed sales for them with MS Publisher which 
was frequently a freebie extra when a computer was sold.

BTW, just out of curiosity I took a quick look on the net and found this 
intro to it as the third item on the search results for "Microsoft 
Publisher". It is after the two hits on Microsoft's own pages. Take a 
look. This is how you need to have a quick start guide look. It's not 
enough to really do anything complex, just enough to do something small.

http://www.bcschools.net/staff/PublisherHelp.htm

Frankly, I don't understand Scribus well enough to do even this level of 
documentation and be sure I got it right.

[snip]

> Oh, and BTW, I doubt ease-of-use was the key factor to M$'s success.
> Remember that joke: "How many MS engineers does it take to change a
> light bulb?" -- "None. Bill Gates declares darkness as industry standard."

You are right in a very limited sense. However, having watched others 
use the other terrible program Microsloth puts out called FrontPage, I 
can tell you that the average end-user that needs something more than 
notepad will give you after hours and hours of study does indeed find it 
easy to use. Not great, but easy. And all the jokes about light bulbs 
and Microsoft won't change the end-user perception of the program even 
though we know what could be.

Best,

Allen