[Scribus] Book length projects.

[Craig Ringer]

Jason Champion wrote:

> Why wouldn't it?

- The current text engine has a number of serious issues with
performance, justification quality, etc. These are being addressed with
the new text engine work in the unstable branch, so expect big
improvements here.

- Styling support is somewhat limited, making control of formatting in
large bodies of text harder. This is an issue in technical writing more
than in novels, because technical writing tends to use a lot more
styling of terms and phrases. Again, this is being improved with char
style support etc and import facilities for it.

- The text engine scales very poorly for large volumes of text, and can
become unusably slow when faced with long chains of large text frames.
Work is also being done in this area, but I don't know how much it'll
improve without more rendering engine changes too - I'm no longer
keeping track of development well enough.

- As mentioned, widow/orphan control is currently lacking. I think avox
is working on widow/orphan handling as part of the new text system work.

- There's no support for automatic index creation, and there's no decent
way to add it to current builds. However, once character styles are
fully supported in the development series, an index tagging system could
probably be built on top of the char styles infrastructure.

> I could see possibly adding a rudimentary index feature similar to the 
> table of contents generation -- flag a text frame with its related 
> "Index" variable and a list of comma-separated keywords and hit 
> "generate index" and the index would be built from that.

Yeah, that'd work, but as you noted it'd be pretty tedious. I'd prefer
to be able to use char styles to mark indexable terms myself.

> It might even be conceivable that you could specifically flag a word or 
> group of words as "indexable" in the text frame editor and not need to 
> tie it in with styles -- just as you could bold or underline text, you 
> could also index it.

That'd probably be ideal, though I expect char styles or their
underlying file format and text frame support would be used as the
underlying mechanism for doing that.

--
Craig Ringer