[Scribus] feedback from typesetting 250 page book

[Craig Bradney]

> _Bugs_ -
>
> 1. My biggest issue was the slowness of using the story editor.
> To do a find and replace of inch marks to turn them into curly quotes in
> the story editor it would take up to 30 seconds per replacement. This
> would mean sometimes a wait of 10 minutes for doing a 'replace all' on a
>  15 page article for inch marks alone. It seems that the story editor
> rescans the entire text for a single replacement.

To be fixed in 1.3.4 or 1.3.5. The new text system is coming and this will be 
fixed after that.

> 2. Once I got over 40,00 words or so the whole program was running VERY
> VERY slowly. This was mildly improved by using Fluxbox instead of GNOME
> in the non cross platform attempts. The total word count was 88,361
> which was unmanageable.

As with 1.

> 3. Opening files took a long time sometimes a few minutes when the files
> got more text - sometimes up to 5 minutes or more.
>
> 4. Once the file got over 200 pages I was not able to reopen it at all -
>  this was heartbreaking as I really lost a lot of work at this point. I
> can send the file through to any of the developers to look at if you
> think it would be helpful for you, just mail me offlist> . 

Please send to me.. email me some links to downlaod from or files at 
mrb at scribus.info.

> 5. the page numbers stopped appearing in the 'page navigation' box after
> 34 pages in Scribus 1.3.2 Fink.

We don't really support Fink installs these days, however 1.3.2 is ages old 
now, especially on the OSX platform. It could be a Qt/OSX thing. Does it 
happen with 1.3.3.1 on OSX?

> 6. The in 'document setup' the 'sections' option made the box appear
> infinitely to the right hand side in  Scribus 1.3.2 Fink making it
> unusable.

Unsure what you mean here. Screenshot?

> 7. When Copy and pasting text boxes repeatedly over many pages sometimes
> the title of the text boxes (normally saying 'textbox 164' or something
> like that) would be replaced by a huge string of xml. (I belive that Ive
> seen this reported in the bug tracker or mailing but thought I should
> mention it again in case)

Never seen that one.. is there a bug already?

> _funtionality_
>
> 1. The fact that it is not possible to adjust the line spacing of a
> single line of text (i.e. to pull it up closer to the line above)
> without effecting all other lines of text in the text box is a serious
> problem. Or am I missing something here?

You can by using multiple styles but thats a hack IMO. See very first point.

> 2. I know its been said before, but.. The baseline and linespacing
> options took me two days to find. Its placement is not intuitive at all.
> Make the options as checkboxes or at least have text in the 'up' display
> of the drop down menu.

Being fixed with the new style manager in 1.3.4cvs.

> 3. it would be good if it was possible to import open office .sxw files
> from the story editor. At the moment its only possible to do this with
> the right mouse click and selecting 'get text...'. But not possible when
> using thee 'load from file' in the story editor, this seems a flaw in
> logic.

Theres a feature request for this. Will be fixed after the other story editor 
changes are done, as above.

> 4. The strange scribus clipboard makes it impossible to get formatted
> and stylesheeted text out of the program while maintaining the
> formatting. It would be invaluable if it was change this to use the
> operating systems clipboard - or to make a feature that allows the user
> to intentionally use the operating systems clipboard instead.

Clipboard is going to be rewritten in parts, we have a few requests/ideas for 
this.

> _features_
>
> 1. I couldnt work out how to make elements on a page that I could use in
> a similar way to the way that indesign and quark hav the master pages ->
> where I can use elements n a page that are easy to duplicate yet also
> editable.

Not possible yet.

> 2. Character styles are invaluable when working with books. I would
> think twice before using scribus for a book again without the feature of
> character styles.

Coming in 1.3.4/1.3.5.

> 3. Smart punctuation would also be an invaluable feature. By smart
> punctuation  I mean changing inch marks into directional curly quotes
> and single apostrophes into single quote marks when they need to.

Maybe in 1.3.4/1.3.5..

> 7. It would be good to have a similar feature for 'sections' like with
> the 'insert page number' option. So that you could simlpy insert a
> 'section name' for running headlines etc.

On the todo list.

I think by the time we get the new text system in, and SE rewritten, and a the 
inheritable character and  paragraph styles done, a lot of the concerns will 
be reduced. 1.3.5+ will be a completely different Scribus to 1.3.3.

Is there a chance we can get a full copy of your document, images and all, so 
we can use it for stress testing before and after the above changes? To my 
mentioned address, if thats ok. I'll share with the other devs.

thanks for the feedback
Craig
>
> _______________________________________________
> Scribus mailing list
> Scribus at nashi.altmuehlnet.de
> http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/attachments/20060505/48b632fb/attachment.pgp