[Scribus] Scientific publishing

[Adrianna Pinska]

On 5/31/06, avox <avox at arcor.de> wrote:
> > Although LaTeX can be considered a standard in this
> > area of publishing, there are certainly many goals that can be easier
> > achieved with a layout software.
> >
> Only two things come into my mind: posters and combing articles from several
> sources into a proceedings publication.

Well, another possible area is layout for more informal magazines
which use a lot of mathematical notation - like mathematical magazines
aimed at students; that's a real world example from my university.
These magazines currently have to choose between nice layout and
terrible formula formatting, or nice formula formatting and formal,
minimalistic layout.

> Here's my take on it:
>
> Scribus should be able to place LaTeX files into specialized textframes.
> Scribus would give LaTeX these textframes as available pages and ask it
> to typeset it. Then Scribus would display the result at the place of the
> frames.

I think that's a great idea; it would probably be better to make a
LaTeX plugin like this than to reinvent the wheel and replicate
everything LaTeX does.  Although maybe eventually, given enough time
and people working on it, it could be done.

Perhaps the ideal solution is delegating the formatting of formulae
and graphs to LaTeX (since this is both very complicated and very
specialised, and should be left to a specialised tool which already
does it very well), and handling everything else natively (like
references and tables of contents, which are more generally
applicable, and simpler)?

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