[scribus] Long Document Preparation Workflows

[Aaron W. Hsu]

On Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:38:48 -0500, Gregory Pittman  
<gregp_ky at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The arguments you make suggest that you would be better off having your  
> contributors work with plain text files in a simple editor. OTOH,  
> importing ODT styles does not prevent you from applying your own custom  
> styles within Scribus. Importation of styles from ODT files is meant to  
> be a convenience, but if it's not for you, work in some other way.

The main issue for me is being able to track changes to the document text  
that occur after the text has been imported into the document. In the  
normal workflow, it's okay to do everything in a Word Processor, and then  
import it in once that has been finalized, do the layout, and finally,  
tweak any character and paragraph styles as necessary. However, as soon as  
a revision needs to be made, you need to re-import the text, and doing so  
will lose, at least, all of your character styles, because I don't see any  
way to import Character styles. If I could do that, then I don't see any  
good reason for Scribus to not be able to do long documents right now,  
excepting maybe memory and speed, which can be handled with some  
workarounds.

To be clear, I do *not* want Scribus to beocme a text editor or a word  
processor. It is a layout program, and I'm fine with that. What I want is  
for it to do my layout while allowing me to do other things in other  
programs, and not have them mess each other up. At the moment, non-linear  
DTP (a workflow where text editing can happen after or before the layout  
begins) seems to be very time consuming.

	Aaron W. Hsu

-- 
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.