[scribus] Typesetting of mathematical formula in Scribus

[Hans Schmidt]

Am 15.11.2013 22:12, schrieb john Culleton:
> The question is, how does Scribus support the typesetting of
> mathematical formula. The render icon (looks like a gear wheel)
> will allow you to create a frame that can be used to access
> LaTeX.

I think this is just a workaround and not really suited for a good
typesetting software. I hope that at some point Scribus might support
native formulas.
>
> If you have lots of formulae you might consider typesettng your
> document in TeX instead. Your choices are pdftlatex (most
> popular), pdftex (simplest) Context (my choice for nonfiction)
> and luatex or lualatex (with Context allows widest range of
> fonts.)
But the problem is that Latex is, well, not really the same as a DTP
software. It is good if you are writing strictly linear texts without
any design, but if you want to design magazines or some visually more
appealing books, it is not really suited. Also, imho, Tex has some
design flaws dating back 30 years and is just not modern anymore
(especially unicode, multilingual support, graphics etc; needing
packages for almost anything beyond basic typesetting).

Therefore I strongly hope that Scribus will at some point in the future
be a good alternative to Latex for scientific documents, meaning writing
long documents with mathematical formulas. I can imagine that Scribus
would also offer some markup language like Tex, which can then be
compiled using the Scribus engine or be imported in a Scribus document
and doing some manual corrections afterwards. For example, setting the
page settings in the file header (where are text frames, where should
the page numbering go etc), writing the text in Latex/html similar style
for showing paragraphs, font formatting, including mathematical
formulas, defining picture and tabular environments etc. Afterwards,
load this into Scribus and the page will be set up automatically.
Similarly, Scribus could offer a dual view with source code and preview,
showing the texts in the source code in a live view. Some often used
things could be implemented with Python scripts or some easier script
language, therefore offer the same functionality as Latex packages do
(Although Scribus should try to implement as much core functunality in
Scribus as possible).

This could then be much more simpler and cleaner than Latex Code, but
more suited for people who want to write in this fashion and not in
WYSIWYG style.