[scribus] WTactis and Scribus struggle

[Gregory Pittman]

On 01/12/2011 12:59 PM, Lukasz Jastrzebski wrote:
> Gregory!
> I indeed have my pressure raised from time to time. Don't worry, it was not
> the case.
>
> I'm calm, happy person. Not furious, not angry, not mindless. Not native
> English speaker as well. Try to imagine me that way.
>
> I spent something like a month, at least 30 hours, investigating various
> tools that could be used for Wtactics (and provide for our players) to make
> good-looking cards. And most of it was spent face to face with Scribus.
> First step was eliminating Inkscape, which we make various things in, as it
> is totally not suitable for what printing industry needs (no CMYK editing
> features, no grained PDF export). Also Gimp was no-go for us, due to the
> fact that working with CMYK plugins or PDF export equals rasterizing text
> there and lengthy handcrafting each card. So I left with LaTeX and Scribus.
> Both "should work" theoretically. And LaTeX will never be easy for potential
> contributors or indie developers.
>
> What you wrote, apart from what I asked not to write, because I know that
> already, is to use examples from Advanced Drop Caps article.
>
> I saw that, I read it twice long time ago, when designing card text styles.
> There is no way for using two text frames for one paragraph and calling it
> simple or effective. Also, please note that I did what I wanted to do in a
> single text frame. It just makes a need for manual line break followed by
> tabulator (which is lame, makes a little mess, but unlike first
> line indentation is tweakable from under properties palette).
> Why I wrote, is that when you try to do that in the way I would describe as
> effective, drop cap behaves like an alien monolith. All the fields are ready
> for input, character style is applied, yet it remains untouched. Which is a
> bug I already have seen in Mantis.

About the most we can do here is to try to offer some known alternatives 
to accomplish various things. We realize they might not be as efficient 
as some built-in function, but this is what we have.

In general, it seems you have tried various ways. You may find that with 
practice or maybe some small script helpers, it's not so bad after all.

Greg