[scribus] Among the vices:,Dead slow with book length files

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:01:37 -0500
Michael Chamness <chamness at daktel.com> dijo:

>  Quark recommends chapters into discrete files for books. Somebody 
>recently mentioned that for books in Scribus also. Makes sense to me. 
>I've only done one book, that in Quark in 2005, 160 pages with lots of 
>images, but every chapter sits in its own file on the DVD archive
>discs, all images sit in an image file.

However QuarkXPress, InDesign, and other layout apps, and even office
word processors these days, offer a "master document" feature. The
advantage of the master document is that it automatically keeps your
pagination continuous across all the individual "chapter" files. It
also enforces styles across all the chapters. And for those apps that
do indexing and footnotes it keeps them continuous as well. And when
you export to PDF from the master document it automatically adds the
chapters so you don't have to export individual PDFs for each of the
chapters and then assemble them.

All of the features of a master document can be done manually as well.
It's just easier and more convenient to use a master document to keep
things automatically synchronized. If I add pages to chapter 3 of a
book of ten chapters, then I have to go change the beginning page
numbers of the following seven files. 

For the above reasons, when doing a recent book of 150 pages I did it
in one file. Yes, editing was slow. But I discovered a lot of
workarounds to speed things up. For example, I created a clone of the
book document, but with a dozen empty pages. This document had all the
styles of the main document. If I needed to edit a complex vector
graphic (painfully slow in the main document), I copied it to the
Scrapbook, then into the small clone document. Editing it in the clone
document was snappy and easy. When I was finished I copied the new
version to the Scrapbook, and then into the main document. 

I know speeding up Scribus on long documents is on the enhancement list
and the developers are doing their best. In the meantime I managed by
being creative in my work.