[scribus] a new ebook

[Johan Vromans]

ale rimoldi <ale.comp_06 at xox.ch> writes:

>> PDF X/1-A:2001 asap. This is planned for 1.5 but I don't know how long
>> 1.5 will take.
>
> it's not planned it is in 1.5svn!

I know, I tried it :)

The point is: do we have to wait until next year or would it be possible
to 'backport' PDF X/1-A:2001 export to 1.4.x ?

>> A better / more flexible way to design, edit and apply text styles.
>
> yep, here we need somebody spending some time for a good specification.
>
> there are lot of ideas on how to do it better. but we need somebody
> taking on him/herself the leading task in the specification work.
>
> however, here is my idea:

Sounds like a decent approach.

What I find frustrating is that the work has been done before. Several
times. It is not possible to rip the implementation out of e.g.,
LibreOffice, but having (more or less) the same specs and ui could be
beneficial.

>> A better / more flexible way to manipulate images (interactive scale /
>> translate / crop).
>
> we have two patches for crop (on pdf export and during the layout
> phase) and i think that they will be merged in, as soon as somebody has
> checked that they work correctly (for the user, not in the code! there
> is sooo much that can go wrong, here...)
>
> for scale and translate (translate? mmm...) we need somebody specifying
> the user interaction...

This is what brought me to proposing this item.

I have a page design with a image frame. When loading an image in the
frame I (usually) see the top-left corner of the image. 

Now, all I can do is scale the image to the frame (or vice versa, but
that's not relevant here). I would like to be able to interactively
scale, and move (translate) the image. Cropping may not be necessary
since whatever falls outside the frame is not included in the finale
export (AT LEAST, I ASSUME...).

If doing the scaling/moving in place would be too difficult to implement
I can imagine a reversed approach:

Activate 'Image fitting' mode via menu selection or hot key.

Scribus now shows a screen-filling image of the image, with a rectangle
that corresponds to the frame and shows what part of the image is
currently visible in the frame. Now the user can move the frame over the
image to find the desired part of the image, and pull one of the
rectangle's corners to select the desired cutout. When Image fitting
mode is exited, the image frame on the page shows the desired part of
the image.

(I hope it is clear what I have in mind. If not I need to make some
illustrations to illustrate the process.)

>> Improved pre-flight checker. The more problems are caught the better.
>
> just list the missing cases and i will try to add them!

I'm confident the current pre-flight checker catches many cases. But
still we hear on this list about PDFs that are rejected (or misprinted)
by publishers. For these we need to find out what went wrong, and try
adding this as a additional case to check.

So it is a matter of collecting user experiences and extract the test
case from the materials.

Hope this is helpful.

-- Johan