[Scribus] Usability needs attention -- time for a feature moratorium?

[John Beardmore]

Craig Ringer wrote:
> John Beardmore wrote:

>> While Scribus has shortcomings, the community seems to be actively 
>> overcoming these, and even 1.3.3.x seem to be less buggy and crash prone 
>> than Pagemaker and InDesign.
>
> I don't know about that ... I've found InDesign CS 3 is pretty solid for 
> general tasks.

Perhaps.  We stopped upgrading InDesign at v1.5 when they tried to get 
us to buy into CS.  And having steered us towards InDesign, they then 
released Pagemaker 7 anyway.  We also heard reports that users of 
InDesign 2 had problems importing our InDesign 1.5 documents which 
wasn't exactly encouraging.  That was the last straw for us.

Re bugs we found that from InDesign, we could print PCL fast but only 
single sided.  Postscript could do duplex printing, but took for ever if 
big documents were collated.

Pagemaker 6.52 just crashed when documents of any size or complexity 
were heavily edited.  Don't mention PDF export for either of them.


> QuarkXPress 7,
> on the other hand, is on par with or only slightly better than Scribus 
> in stability and about
> AU$1500 ( or a factor of 1:? ) more expensive. (Quark rip people in 
> Australia off particularly
> terribly; their prices here are half again to twice the US price even 
> once exchange rates are
> factored in, and if you buy direct from the US they won't do *any* 
> support etc).

Despicable !


> Additionally, version 7.3 still has bugs that make it impossible to 
> print on some Mac systems
> without users manually hacking PPD files or printing through a non-Apple 
> CUPS server. It
> also *loves* to corrupt the Mac OS X font cache when it crashes (even 
> when the machine
> running Quark has nothing but Adobe OTF Collection fonts), and not 
> infrequently generates
> bad PostScript that leaves printers with genuine Adobe PS 3 RIPs needing 
> a manual job cancel.
> Oh, and it relatively frequently (usually a job or two a week) generates 
> incorrect PostScript and
> PDF output that doesn't match what's on screen.

Happy to have never used it !


Cheers, J/.
-- 
John Beardmore, MSc EDM (Open), B.A. Chem (Oxon), CMIOSH, AIEMA, MEI
Managing Director, T4 Sustainability Limited. http://www.T4sLtd.co.uk/
Carbon Trust Consultant: Energy Audit, Carbon Footprint, Design Advice
Energy Efficiency Accreditation Scheme Registered Assessor
P:0845 4561332  F:0870 0522417  M:07785 563116  Skype:t4sustainability