[Scribus] Scribus for Windows

[John R. Culleton]

On Monday 07 May 2007 11:12, Clare Kitson wrote:
> Thank you so much Louis, Andreas and Greg for all your help.
>
> My book will have a lot of text (maybe 80,000 words) but an
> enormous quantity of pictures too.  And as it's about a visual
> subject (animated films) I need good layout.
>
> I looked at the success stories and  found a 400-page exhibition
> catalogue, which seemed a similar kind of thing.
>
> Louis, do you happen to know what sorts of weaknesses there tend to
> be with long texts?
>
The weakness that Scribus has with long texts has to do with the 
paragraph layout mechanisms. They do not begin to approach those 
availalable with TeX or with InDesign.  Also TeX at least allows for 
global adjustments up front which affect the entire book 
automatically. For example it is quite feasable in TeX to adjust a 
margin with one simple comand and have the entire document reset and 
repginated automatically. So I would not consider Scribus as 
competitive for an 80,000 page work. 

The Context version of TeX allows for excellent placement of graphics 
with (rectangular) text wraparound and so on.

OTOH for an arty or "cocktail table" type book the greater flexibility 
of Scribus for setting type against a curved or irregular shape  
might be irresistible.  In such a book the "grayness" of the text 
block and superior punctuation, indexing, bibliographic support, 
optical alignment, and other bookish features of TeX would be 
irrelevant.


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