[scribus] Scribus

[John Culleton]

On Tuesday 15 June 2010 22:43:02 Murray Strome wrote:
> On Tuesday, May 25, 2010 10:50 AM "John Culleton" 
<john at wexfordpress.com>
> wrote:
>
> Am Freitag, 21. Mai 2010 20:12:39 schrieb Jim:
> > > I need to vent. I say this with conviction
> > > that Scribus is the worst piece of software I have ever used; 
and I
> > > have used a lot of software over the years.
>
> Obviously, you have not been exposed to much software if you 
think this is
> the worst. What about MS Windows?
>
> > > Counter intuitive, klunky and overall frustrating to the point 
of
> > > ripping the very hair out of my skull.
>
> I will agree that I found Scribus to have quite a steep learning 
curve,
> especially since I had never been exposed to any Desktop 
Publishing
> software before, and the whole paradigm was completely new 
to me. Also, a
> lot of things behave very differently than what I would have 
expected.
> Nevertheless, I find it a most powerful and useful tool. I now use 
it for
> creating all of my documents, except for the most simple ones 
which can be
> created by a text editor or OpenOffice (if placement of images 
and
> flexibility are not important).
>
> I agree that Scribus IS a top notch product. I have seen few other 
open
> source products that provide such good support and advice.
>
> > John Culleton
>
> Murray
>


Just for clarity, none of the words above are mine.  Here is what I 
said:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
As my late father would say, there are horses for courses. I find 
that Scribus is excellent for book covers and very handy for flyers, 
press releases and the like. But it cannot begin to touch the 
various forms of TeX for long documents with footnotes,  headers 
that reflect the chapter and section and the like. Only TeX and 
InDesign have the excellent paragraph at a time justification of 
TeX. IMO indexing is more sophisticated in TeX than any other 
product short of dedicated programs like Cindex and Macrex.

Within its range Scribus is a top notch product.  But the range is a 
bit narrow.

I have heard from other Page Plus advocates before. Apparently 
they like it. But I believe that if milk is free one needn't buy a cow.
I like the combination of Scribus for the formatted documents it 
does so well, TeX for formal documents and long books, and Open 
Office writer for saving .Doc files in more useful formats, including 
LaTeX. That is what I am doing today. "
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
"Create Book Covers with Scribus"
Printable E-book 38 pages $5.95
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24676863/
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html