[Scribus] New to email list - a short list of Scribus feedback

[John Hodge]

Hi 
We are moving the dtping of our publication (www.schnews.org.uk) to Scribus, just as we are moving our computers over to Linux (K/Ubuntu) - and I have a few points of feedback - I emailed it to scribus bugtracker but, realise that they need to be treated as separate items. I can't read previous email list, and wonder if people have already come across these...

(Using Scribus 1.3.3.3 in Ubuntu and Windows)

'Paragraph' Settings
* Scribus needs a 'paragraph' dialogue box - which would give options of - distances between paras, and ability to adjust first line indent without having to set it in the 'style' (these are not available currently in Scribus), and other para settings - all in the one box as other dtp progs have.
* When a paragraph is in a 'style', it is not possible to change
certain settings, without removing the style - eg - alignment
(left,right,justify,etc), and first line indent - this is hard to live
with.

PDF Generation
* Better control over producing pdfs - mostly to keep the file size down (I've since found that I can reduce size by making a ps file from Scribus's pdf using 'pdftops', and then making the pdf from that - but this is cumbersome). 
*The ability to print straight to .ps file - with a range of setting options - this would give more control over what gets embedded into the pdf to keep file size down. 
* One thing which may increase the file size is - I noticed that 'bitmap' (black & white) pics which are 'placed' turn into greyscale pics in the pdf.

Text Handling
* Sometimes blocks of text being pasted from OO don't come through -
and you have to paste into Gedit from OO and paste that text into the
Scribus text editor.
* Most text formatting tasks are much quicker in the 'text edit' box - sometimes it's too clunky to try to make the change directly into the actual wysiwyg display.
* If you select text which is in multiple columns, in wysiwyg form, you can select text from one column with the curser, but it does not allow you select from another column - which makes some formatting changes difficult.

Using files over the network...
* When you are trying to open a file which is on another computer over network, using the 'open file' dialogue box, I can't seem to access the other computer even putting in it's //location/ (or what syntax should I use - smb://10.0.etc. etc/etc?). I notice that OpenOffice in Ubuntu 6.06 has improved this aspect of opening and saving files over a network with mouse clicks (it's about giving a sort of 'my network places' thing in the 'save' dialogue box.) (In Windows I can solve this by 'mapping' the network drive, in Linux I'm still learning how to do the equivalent - but sometimes you just need to access a location without having to set up a 'map'.)

Apart from that, Scribus is great. I'm sure many of these points have already come up and I'd be interested to see what the solution to them are...
Cheers
Jim





		
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