[scribus] Long book project in Scribus on 64 Studio

[Daniel James]

Hi Frank,

> Unless your text is linked in some way, break it up into chapters or 
> other logical segments.

I might have to do that, although it seems cumbersome when I'm aiming 
for one PDF file for all inside pages (the cover will be printed 
separately). For reference, I used to be able to do a 300 page book on 
Quark with a 200MHz PowerPC Mac running System 7 about 10-11 years ago. 
That application was more responsive with a document of this size than 
Scribus is now.

> How does Scribus compare in power and speed to Quark?

Scribus is definitely more powerful than the versions of Quark I was 
used to. Although Quark was the de facto DTP standard in those days, it 
had many sucky aspects. In those days there was no native PDF export, so 
you had all kinds of problems when taking Quark projects to the repo 
house, usually on a Syquest cartridge. Like a headline font changing for 
no known reason on page 150, so you had to check every single piece of 
film from the imagesetter. Also, there was no support for creating book 
indexes, which I think FrameMaker could do.

> 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.

Yes, it was comparable, and I did a couple of books and some magazine 
issues on Pagemaker 5 for Windows. But vendor lock-in meant nearly all 
professional DTP shops (in the UK at least) were forced to use Quark, 
because without PDF being available, you had to be able to read and 
write native Quark format.

Cheers!

Daniel