[scribus] The Scribus target - a question for the developers

[avox]

John Culleton-3 wrote:
> 
> On Monday 08 September 2008 06:54:40 pm John Beardmore wrote:
>> Mike Morris wrote:
>> > On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Gregory Pittman
>> > <gpittman at iglou.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Thank you for your response.  Perhaps Scribus will always remain
>> > a work in process.  If Linus Torvalds is correct, that is
>> > probably a good thing for the capabilities of the application. 
>> > Although, in my opinion, that will limit the impact of Scribus on
>> > the industry.
>>
>> I can't agree. Who wants to be locked into product that isn't
>> evolving and won't respond to external change ?
>>
>> Would you invest your time in Linux if development ceased ?
>>
>>
>> Cheers, J/.
> 
> I have many product resources, all Open Source. I consider Scribus to 
> be a niche product. It is strong for book covers, illustrated 
> newsletters, coffee table books  and the like. It will never replace 
> e.g., TeX for long books or books with with indexes, footnotes etc.  
> When I typeset a novel I don't want to jump through hoops just to get 
> widow/orphan suppression, running heads and so on.  And things like 
> hanging punctuation, microtypography and so on are just beyond the 
> reach of Scribus or any similar product.
> 

Funny you'd say that, I implemented hanging punctuation and glyph extension
in 1.3.4. Pierre implemented OTF features in FontMatrix and I have a
prototype
of a paragraph layouter for Scribus. And footnotes and widow/orphan control
are definitely on our todo list. So I wouldn't say that's out of our reach.



> 
> There are horses for courses, as they used to say at the race track. 
> 
> My major complaint is slow operation. Others complain too and at least 
> one has recently abandoned Scribus for this reason.  
> 

Yes, that's a serious problem. 



> I have already asked for PDF/X1a:2001 compliant output for book covers 
> for LSI but got no positive vibes back.  In the USA this is a serious 
> handicap.  One has to buy Acrobat Distiller just for this feature, or 
> accept degraded cover art.  
> 

The Scribus export settings for PDF/X1a:2001 would be:
- PDF 1.3
- target: printer
- no colormanagement
- dont use custom settings for print output
- you might have to check "convert spot colors to process" if you used spot
colors and the printer doesnt want them
- for 1.3.5svn: do *not* embed PDF/PS (unless you are sure the embedded PDF
complies to PDF/X1a).
- embed or outline all fonts.

You must not use any PDF form elements or javascript.

The resulting PDF would comply to PDF/X1a:2001 except that it's not labeled
as such and the Output Intent (CMYK) is missing. Both exceptions will not
alter the way the PDF is output.

To get good results with PDF/X1a you have to work against the printer's
profile. Scribus can't help you with that. With PDF/X3 Scribus would embed
the used profiles so that the printer can convert the colors
to the profile they need, ensuring that the colors you see are as close to
the printed colors as possible with your monitor calibration.

HTH
/Andreas


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