[Scribus] Torture Testing Scribus on Windows
DaleCoz at aol.com
DaleCoz
Thu Mar 23 06:02:15 CET 2006
Hi. I'm Dale Cozort. I'm new to this list, and relatively new to actually
using Scribus, though I have been keeping an eye on the project for over a year
now.
I'm a big fan of Open Source, but I'm kind of stuck using Windows, so I was
very happy to see a Windows version of Scribus 1.3.2. Since that version of
Scribus came out, I've given it a workout. I would like to share some of my
experiences with your.
? I used Scribus to teach a group of high school students in an advanced
computer class a three week section on Desktop Publishing.
? As part of that section I wrote about half a dozen instructional
worksheets on Scribus. I used Scribus to write and lay out those worksheets
? I did layout for two issues of my PDF alternate history newsletter in
Scribus. The first issue was a little under 30 pages long. The second issue was
55 pages long. I used Scribus to export both of them to PDF
? I wrote two smaller newsletters (2 pages each) on computer changes at the
school where I teach.
In other words I've really given Scribus a workout in the last few months.
Here are some impressions:
First it was probably a good six months too early in the Scribus development
cycle to be trying to use it the way I tried to use it. That's not
surprising. Scribus 1.3.2 is part of the development branch of Scribus-really not
intended to be production quality or rock stable yet. Not surprisingly, Scribus
crashed a few times. It didn't crash often enough to be unusable, but it
crashed often enough to reinforce my habit of saving work early and often. Some
features didn't work, or didn't work the way I thought they should. Again, that
isn't unexpected. This is not production software yet, and doesn't claim to
be. Some things werre harder to do than I expected them to be, such as
bulleting paragraphs and putting two booklet-sized pages side-by-side and printing
them in landscape mode. I'm probably not telling you anything new when I tell
you that Scribus got slow when my documents got big. By the time I reached 50
pages it was a real struggle to navigate in the document.
At the same time, I was pretty happy overall with my experience. I knew what
I was getting into in terms of this version of Scribus being a development
version. It got the job done for me, and I'm happy with it, though I am eagerly
awaiting future versions with more features and fewer bugs.
I'm afraid that I didn't win many friends for Scribus among my students.
They tried some very ambitious things, and succeeded in doing some impressive
work, but they also ran into the bugs and unintuitive behavior. One girl wrote
me a note saying that Scribus developers should be hunted down and strung up.
I explained that this was bleeding edge software, and that she will be much
happier with it if she tries again in six months. I hope she does. It'll
probably be a good product for what I tried to do in another couple of versions
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