[scribus] Poor hyphenation in french language

[Christian Schilmöller]

Hello list!

I'am typesetting a book in french with scribus.
Unfortunately, the automated hyphenation causes a lot of work
and leads to a lot of complains from the original author.

In the hyphenation menu in the document settings, the
language is set correctly set to french. 
However, the hyphenation algorithm does not meet the
special requirements of the french:

Some examples:
Some short words like avant, comme, guerre, cannot by hyphenated
at all. Words like nation, situation, libération (ending -tion)
are hyphenated before the last two characters (-ti-on), which is
wrong. Many verbs in the third person plural end like -ient, -aient
etc but a hyphen is wrongly placed into that last syllable.

I've finished the book by inserting many soft-hyphens with ctrl-
shift-"-" and also filling the exceptions list. But this solution
is very fragile. If any small change should be made in the text
or the layout, many hyphens and line endings have to be checked
again.

Is there any way of creating a "test setup" which demonstrates
my problem more clearly?

I'm used to text processors which work more reliably (e. g.
OpenOffice or Tex/LaTex) concerning hyphenation.

I looked into the files belonging to scribus, but I cannot
figure out that something is missing there.
There is a file named "hyph_fr.dic" which seems to be 
responsible for hyphenation. The file is readable and has
a content which seems reasonable.
Is it possible that this file is not used as it should be?

Is this really a problem of scribus or am I doing something
basically wrong?

Thanks for any help in advance!

Christian

P.S. The problem appears in these 3 setups:
Scribus 1.4.0 with Windows XP
Scribus 1.4.1 with Windows 7
Scribus 1.4.1 with Debian Linux