[Scribus] Real life expirience with Scribus 1.3.4cvs

[Vladimir Savic]

Hi developers and other listeners,

After you've solved problems that lead to crash, I was able to continue 
working with Scribus. Here are some observations and thoughts along with 
suggestion I think users would benefit from. Attached is continued work on 
the file from the Bugzilla. Actually, two rather big files to be sent to the 
list, but please don't be resent. :) One file is .sla and the second one is 
exported .pdf (exported during work - with no reloading of Scribus document). 
For the best experience side by side comparison is advised... :)


Here's the summary of what should be bug reports at first place, but then I 
thought it would be better to hear some others opinion (I would not be 
surprised to hear that many of issues are actually my fault/misunderstanding 
of page layout concept and principles):

1) Shadow color is not exported to pdf as properly. Take a look at the first 
page of .pdf and .sla original. Text should be 100% black and shadow 50% 
tinted black.
I had really big problems with this one. Scribus was constantly confused with 
assigning which color to what "object". Operation performed on canvas with 
text selected with text tool.
Saturation of color value is not persistant when an text object has shadowed 
text decoration turned on. Try it. Write down your name, select it and give 
yourself dropped shadow (from Properties palette).  Point drop shadow 
saturation to 50%. Deselect text and select it again. Expected values 100%  
for saturation of text and 50% for saturation of text, but somehow values got 
inverted.

2) Click on the text frame (any) and open it in Editor (Ctrl+Y). Observe the 
layout text somehow got... Center aligned are barely few sentences of text 
(looking at canvas) but almost every paragraph is center aligned in editor. 
Have no idea what happened here. Strangely, update and exit editor will not 
mess up the canvas text.

3) Shift+Return shortcut (Insert->New Line) is not working but every other is. 
Speaking of Story editor, not on-canvas editing, where it works as expected.

4) Go to the end of text and you'll see one red * indicating that I've entered 
non-paragraph-breaking new line. Place cursor one place behind that * and hit 
backspace followed by Return key. Leave the Editor by updating text and now 
whole canvas got messed up.

5) Go back to the Story editor and click on paragraph style area and observe 
how all the paragraph styles have added "+" sing indicating that there is the 
change in comparison to the original style (Am I right?!) but nothing 
indicated it before reaching that part of the dialog. I consider that to be a 
bug!
And I also think "+" sign is bad indicator (borrowed from InDesign) because 
nothing has been added, it has been changed! Semantic is just really bad! 
Actually sucks! :)

6) Suggestion relative to item no. 5 : add tooltip when hovering over the 
character style ribbon that will explicitly tell what has been the change, if 
any. Something like:
---------------------------------
| font size: 12pt  (10pt) |
---------------------------------          where bracketed value
                                                      would be 
                                                      bold -- indicating
                                                      original value, for
                                                      example

I have counted some 20 relevant information that should be visible in the 
tooltip in the worst case (but that's insane already, because it's whole new 
style actually)

7) Just opening and closing style editor freezes Scribus for about five 
seconds. No change need to do for that delay!

8) There is inconsistency between tool behavior. Every tool except frame 
linker falls back to selector, which is bad IMHO.


Thank you for attention! Any suggestion and comment (and probably criticism) 
appreciated,

Vladimir Savic



P.S. It'd probably be much more intuitive for me to break this, not so long, 
text into frames and work that way (like on 1st page of example document), 
but I wanted to save myself from tweaking of frames because snapping to 
guides is still buggy. I'm aware of both facts written above.

P.P.S. Is there any way to adjust frame size to it's content's size? I could 
not find that.
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