[scribus] Using Scribus for a newsletter

[John Beardmore]

John Culleton wrote:

> AFAIK MSWindows at the command line still has the facilities and 
> limitations of early MSDOS for the most part. MSDOS in turn had a 
> very restricted interface loosely based on early Unix.

Or VMS or CP/M...


> Linux however has the full facilities of the Unix interface, and many 
> of the later Unix utilities from Berkeley Source Distribution (BSD) 
> etc. were just transferred over and recompiled.  From the graphic 
> windowed interface Linux and MSWindows have roughly comparable 
> capabilities, with Linux copying the Windows way of doing things, but 
> from the command line Linux has many more facilities.  The Linux 
> command line has evolved, the MSDOS command line has not. 

Not entirely true, but it is still a backwater. You can now write things 
like

     FOR %%f IN (*.wav) DO lame --abr 256 -h "%%~nf.wav" "%%~nf.mp3"

though (which I don't recall in DOS 2.0), for 'convert all the wav files 
into mp3 files using lame', but it's even more cryptic than #!/bin/bash.

But the windows command line is still improving. The tab file name 
auto-complete is new in XP and saves a lot of time.


> The *nix way of doing things tends to break tasks down into individual 
> components, and use a special purpose program for each.  
> 
> These differences in capabilities leads to different work habits.  
> Windows users work from the gui and seldom or never use the command 
> line

Those we disparage don't, but this sort of thing is a dangerous 
generalisation.


> whereas Linux users have command line windows open all over the 
> place, and will often use a command line to call graphical programs 
> like Scribus. Scripting is also far more powerful in Linux than in 
> MSDOS, constituting a kind of programming language. 

Having written batch files to collect data for the UK national pop 
charts as .BAT files using the native syntax and hand crafted command 
line utilities I would suggest that it's more programmable than you 
might assume.


Cheers, J/.
-- 
John Beardmore, MSc EDM (Open), B.A. Chem (Oxon), CMIOSH, AIEMA, MEI
Managing Director, T4 Sustainability Limited. http://www.T4sLtd.co.uk/
Energy Audit, Carbon Management, Design Advice, Sustainable Energy
Consultancy and Installation, Carbon Trust Standard Registered Assessor
Phone: 0845 4561332   Mobile: 07785 563116   Skype: t4sustainability