[Scribus] Image frame doesn't make any sense to me

[Craig Ringer]

dax702 wrote:

> Before finding that EPS solution, I started fiddling around with my other
> options, namely PNG, TIFF and BMP.  The problem that happens is simply this:
> These music images are to span the width of the page, within the margins, so
> I click "I" for image frame and I'm given the frame drawing tool.  So I drag
> a box with the mouse to make a frame close to what I think th size should be
> (having to draw out an arbitrary size frame close to what I *think* it
> should be is dumb to me)

Fair enough, and it'd be nice if that worked all the time. The trouble
is that the majority of the time, when users import images, the hints in
the image are wrong, invalid, or just not related to what they're doing.
Your workflow is a bit of a corner case. Honouring the image hints by
default would leave people importing "small" images that appear
absolutely huge on the canvas, "big" images that are pinpricks they
can't find, etc.

It'd probably be OK with some sanity checking and heuristics for what's
sensible, but people would still see a lot of weird & inconsistent results.

> Then I get the image and it places it.  If I've
> drawn the frame big enough, then it's ok.  If the frame drawn was too small,
> sometimes when you go to resize the frame, then the picture doesn't fill the
> whole frame or just does odd things with the image size.

That absolutely should not happen. Either the image size hints are
invalid or you've hit a bug.

Being able to get hold of one of the problem images would be very handy.
Feel free to email me one direct; my mail account and server are used to
much worse abuse than that.

> TIFF seems to work
> better for some reason than PNG.  But it appears so far to me that any
> non-vector image (of sheet music at least) is NOT legible on the screen at
> 100% (see my post in the other topic for screen shot) and thus cannot be
> worked with when assembling a book and I need to see these exercises quickly
> and as they are going to appear, generally, in context with the rest of the
> book.

Without seeing it, I can't usefully comment on that.

> Perhaps I'm just used to web and video where things need to be exact, web
> more so than video.  If I save an image in Photoshop that's 3"x5" then when
> I put it on the page in Scribus, you can be sure that I want it at 3"x5" and
> I shouldn't have to guestimate this by drawing a frame first IF I don't want
> to.  It just makes a lot more sense.

Yes, it does _if_ you open, edit, resize, and save every image you use
in Scribus. You're one of the small group of users who do so; the vast
majority will instead just pull in the resources directly and do their
sizing on the page. Unfortunately, many of those resources have wildly
inappropriate size hints for the intended use, presuming the image
wasn't created by an app that fails to include them entirely or just
writes garbage.

> Image frames have their place, and
> what I'm suggesting has its place too, especially for these types of music
> images. I set my margins in Sibelius so that the image would fall exactly
> into the margins in Scribus and it doesn't, and that's annoying.  So again,
> if I don't want to draw an image frame in order to place an image, then I
> shouldn't have to.

It should probably be possible to Insert->Image to get the functionality
you want, yes. I'd like to see that, but I honestly don't think it'd be
seen as a high priority given the limited use case and the fact that
resize-frame-to-image *should* be equivalent in utility. In fact,
Scribus would certainly implement frameless image insert by creating a
tiny frame where the user clicks, placing the image, then trigging a
resize of the frame to the image size hint information.

> image frame was too frustrating and no
> matter what you put into that frame, it's not legible on the screen..

I'd definitely like to see one of the bitmap images you had problems
with, both in on-screen quality and with the resize image to frame function.

--
Craig Ringer