[Scribus] Torture Testing Scribus on Windows

[Maciej Hanski]

DaleCoz at aol.com napisa?(a):
> 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  
> 
> 

Hi Dale and welcome to the list :)
This was a very interesting read, glad to hear you've been doing that
much to introduce OpenSource at your school. I've something to say to
the reactions of your students. I wonder, if you've considered
triggering these emotions, possibly anger into something more
constructive. They  could learn how to communicate bugs and usability
issues to Open Source developers and help them this way. One final
lesson devoted to  discussing  problems, filing bugs to
bugs.scribus.net, even chatting with Scribus devs on
irc://irc.freenode.net/#scribus could be a very positive experience to
your students.

cheers
Maciej

	

	
		
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