[scribus] Long book project in Scribus on 64 Studio

[Frank Swygert]

I'm not fluent in Scribus, just now getting it installed! But I have been working with DTP on a part time basis since 1990 or so, mostly in PageMaker under Windows (PM4-PM6, as far as I'm concerned anything over 6 is junk -- maybe not 6.5, never tried that -- but the others are totally different look and feel). 

Unless your text is linked in some way, break it up into chapters or other logical segments. Could be chapters 1-10 in one section, 11-20 in the next, etc. I did that for my first large book (just under 200 pages of mixed text and graphics) when I first started using a DTP program (on a Mac SE, which WAS a bit slow compared to now!). I over did it the first time, broke it all up into chapters which were 10-20 pages. Later I merged the files into three parts, which was more convenient to work with. 

How does Scribus compare in power and speed to Quark? I've only had the opportunity to play with Quark a couple times, and that was over 10 years ago, but it seemed comparable in most respects, at least generally, to PM. I'm curious to see how you compare the two. I will be trying the tiral version of PageStream later, but will give Scribus a workout first. 



-------------
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:31:01 +0100
From: Daniel James <daniel at 64studio.com>

I've long been a Scribus fan, using the program for short documents, of 
only a few pages. Many years ago I used to lay out books using Quark.

Now I'm attempting to lay out a 300 page plus A5 book, all text and no 
pictures. I'm using Scribus 1.3.3.12svn in our 64 Studio 2.1 distro 
(Debian Etch based). I believe our 2.1 release was slightly before the 
final Scribus 1.3.3.12 release, hence the package version number.

At the moment I'm up to about 90 pages, and navigation through the 
document is already quite slow, for example after clicking in a text 
frame. The page up and page down keys aren't always responsive either. 
I'm running the software on a dual Opteron 240 with 1GB RAM, so the 
hardware isn't particularly slow. Also, opening the document is very 
slow, taking a minute or two.

I've already disabled all the fonts in Preferences -> Fonts except the 
ones I'm using. Are there any other speed-up tips I could try? I notice 
that each text frame is treated as a separate layer, even though they 
don't overlap - perhaps that doesn't help.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Publisher, "American Motors Cars" 
Magazine (AMC)
For all AMC enthusiasts
http://farna.home.att.net/AMC.html
(free download available!)