[scribus] Inline editing character controls in your face

[John Beardmore]

K.King wrote:
> Hi "a.l.e."

> it's ok to do so. but:
> - you're ideas will be taken more seriously if you refrain from 
> comparing scribus with publisher
>  >>
> seriously? that comes across as a little childish.
> I was just trying to suggest a feature that I know many of my clients 
> use in that application we must not mention.
> If something similar is not available or as easy to achieve then it will 
> make asking them to consider using Scribus more difficult.
> Does Scribus not want more users, or only if they are worthy and have 
> not used that that should not be mentioned?

This kind of thing may seem a bit odd, but I guess you have to ask 
yourself why people use [quality] DTP software as opposed to that which 
is bundled with office.

I used to try and do a news letter with word, but it was inflexible, 
buggy, and crashed a lot, so I started to use Pagemaker. These days 
Scribus makes the quality option free which is an added bonus !

No doubt word has moved on a lot since 1996, but I've had problems with 
inflexibility and maybe bugs in Open Office as recently as 2007, which 
again point me back down the path of quality DTP to get fine control and 
flexibility in my work.

Office is an odd environment in that it has some very advanced features 
that make particular specialised tasks easy, yet it (word at least) can 
make some aspects of basic page layout quite difficult.

You're right of course that foaming at the mouth whenever microsoft 
products are mentioned doesn't help discussion, but as, at least to 
experienced DTP users, microsoft software design seems to be flawed in 
so many respects, I can see why 'do it like office' doesn't attract the 
Scribus designers.

I appreciate that not having some feature or other of office may not 
make it easy to attract office users, but I don't think the open source 
community is out to 'pull' microsoft users, so much as to build the best 
tools it can, on the basis of the developers needs and experience.

In as far as this is a concious process at all, I guess the Open Source 
Community wants users that want good tools. It doesn't want users that 
just want a rehash of tools that were not well designed in the first 
place. OSS tends to be about excellence and openness rather than 'bums 
on seats'.

You can of course suggest additional features, but these have to be 
suggested on merit, rather than because some other [flawed] software 
offers them.


Cheers, J/.
-- 
John Beardmore,MSc EDM (Open),B.A. Chem (Oxon),CMIOSH,CEnv,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