[scribus] Scribus Limits, Present and Future

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 7 Aug 2009 11:45:01 -0400
John Morris <johnjeff at editide.us> dijo:

> 1. It sounds to me from a.l.e's and John Beardmore's comments that I 
> should not expect Scribus to smoothly handle any single file of more 
> than about 50 or 60 pages, regardless of the linkages between text 
> boxes. Is that correct? 

I recently completed a student workbook of 120 pages in 1.3.5 Rc3 on
Ubuntu x86_64. The document has a lot of vector graphics, but no
bitmaps. Mostly it is just text, in threaded frames, but generally not
exceeding six frames per story. I did this on a laptop is that is one
and a half years old.

Scribus was painfully slow when working on this document. However,
other than a few bugs still remaining in Rc3, I found Scribus to be
completely stable - never a crash.

This is the first long document I have done in Scribus. In the past I
have done textbooks in InDesign on Windows 2000, up to 550 pages.
InDesign ran as fast with a 550 page document open as it did with a one
page document open. I have also used PageMaker, QuarkXPress and Venture
previously and never had an issue about slow speed when working on long
documents.

I have often wondered what it is about Scribus that makes it run so
slowly with long documents. It's a common complaint, so I'm sure it's
not just me. And I know zero about programming, so I have no idea what
the developers can do to improve the situation.