[scribus] Numerous problems that feel like scribus is screwing my work for me

[a.l.e]

hi alexey,

and what do you want us to do?


it's a serious question.

you have listed several problems you have had while creating your book 
with scribus. some of them are related to a bad workflow, some depend on 
the fact that you used scribus in a wrong way and some are are real 
scribus bugs (which may or may not be already fixed in newer versions).


i will try to answer to most parts of your mail, but you would have been 
better advised to talk to us before or while working on your book.
now, you have had a bad experience and we can't do much for you anymore...



> I have recently tried Scribus for making a 600-paged a5 book. Using 
> Scribus 1.3.3.14 for a week or more now, i have found certain 
> problems, or bugs, i dont know, that seem to look like either scribus 
> is bugged or i am doing something wrong. Those problems persist on two 
> different computers (home, win7, work, winxp)


600 pages? it's huge for scribus.

your lucky that it worked (if you've done in one single file).


> 1) Scribus crashes at me, crashes alot. Mostly it happens if i change 
> an image i use in my book. The moment i save, scribus is crashed. But 
> it also happened once without image change. I dont understand why, 
> because scribus has "update image button" thats supposed to do exactly 
> this - change image, then hit that button

how do you change your images? if it's a different image you should load 
it again in the image frame... it's probably safer...

if you are editing your images after having inserted them in scribus, 
it's a sign of a bad workflow... but i recognize thta -- from time to 
time -- you can't avoid it.

what i guess here, is that your document is so huge, that scribus has 
some problems updating the images because of a lack of memory.
providing a demo file to the devs where the bug happens may help fixing it.
(btw, bugs should be added to the bug tracker: http://bugs.scribus.net . 
for each bug a report, please)


> 2) Scribus does not store coordinates correctly. For exampe, i have a 
> text on a page resting on 19mm x 11mm and when i save the file and 
> reopen it, it becomes 19mm x 10.987mm, or 19mm x 11.049mm, or 
> something similar. I once manually restored everything, it took more 
> than an hour (there is no option to "bunch" the objects to input one 
> value for all, or at least i dont know it exists...). Its still back 
> now! I didnt mention when it happened, but its back, i once again have 
> those "close but not equal" values

this may be a bug. and, iirc, it has already been fixed.

but, again, you can add this to the bug report tracker and upload there 
a (small) file where this can be reproduced?


>
> 3) Scribus does not update styles correctly. For example, i have a 
> text made in OO writer. I import it and i see its not looking good. I 
> then go and change a style in OO, save the text, but! the Style is 
> already imported into scribus it seems, it WONT update it! So i have 
> to manually work on the text in scribus story editor from now on...

why don't you modiy the styles in scribus?



> 4) I have a master page consisting of background (like old paper) and 
> page number (- ### -). I wanted to try out different BG's so i made 
> PDF, closed scribus, changed the images (the same image file just a 
> bit more blended with white to make it less dark, edited in Gimp) and 
> reopened scribus. Now it uses new images all right, BUT, the page 
> numbers are broken. For when i reach big numbers (>100), the third 
> number is sticking into the second, like if there is a negative 
> distance between letters inputted for that number. I cant type it here 
> of course, but it looks like -542-, and 2 is stuck into 4 with its top 
> and bottom left edges. If i open the master page, its fine (the #'s 
> arent stuck into each other) and if i close master page manager, its 
> fine in the book too (back to normal). More than that, if i close 
> scribus after opening it and seeing page numbers stuck into each 
> other, the move back the images with old BG's, reopen scribus, then it 
> will fix itself!

strange. seeing the .sla may help...
really strange.

>
> 5) I have a font installed on my pc, Morpheus. in OO, i can make that 
> font bold (ctrl b). If i import that text into scribus, it complains 
> there is no Morpheus Bold installed in my system! What is that? If 
> Bold is not an option, but a separate font, why does OO allows making 
> bold letters?

scribus does not fake bold. if you don't have the bold version of the 
font, you can't use it as bold in scribus.

oo does fake bold (it makes the chars a bit wider...)


>
> 6) Once i opened my doc in the scribus and some of my pages went 
> corrupt. They were having image frames in them that were linking to 
> several images, but 2 of them (first two image frames occurring in the 
> book) changed into linking to a BG image (never used on the pages 
> themselves, only on the masterpages).

knowing that your shuffling around images in your filesystem, well, i'm 
not surprized that such things happens.

there may be a bug happening with very big files, here... but i think 
it's more likely that you wrongly renamed a file and you get what you've 
told your computer to do... which was not what you meant it should do...

hard to tell more, without knowing the details.

> 7) If i ever want to change the layout of the files on the disk, i 
> have to write down every image's properties on paper and reinput them. 
> Because if i use "get image" the image properties (dpi, x,y,etc) are 
> getting reset! Even if i use "find missing image" they are anyway 
> reset! I started making this project when i had my pictures scattered, 
> some in "pictures" folder, some in "ss" folder, some in root folder, 
> also i've put scribus file into separate folder which later didnt make 
> sence (easer to have it in root folder, easier to navigate from that). 
> That is when i found this problem. TO change my layout of folders, i 
> had to write down every image's properties to paper, then reinput 
> them. Good i had little images used, and what if i would be in a 
> process of making a photoalbum?

a screenshot may help making this bad worklfow faster.

still, you may write a feature request for a "get image" which 
optionally keeps the current settings of the frame. it's a sane request!

> I understand maybe i am doing something wrong. But still...


... still, just show up on the mailing list or in irc when you're having 
a problem... it's easyer to solve them that way!


ah, please, if you answer to this mail, write one mail for each concern. 
you may even set the subject to something matching the content of each mail.


ah, again please, don't answer to me privately, but do first register to 
the mailing list and answer there...

http://lists.scribus.net/mailman/listinfo/scribus

i won't be able to support you for all those concerns. except you're 
living in my neighborood.



have a nice day && good luck for the rest of your project!
al.e