[scribus] Long documents

[John Culleton]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2015 13:40:45 +0000
Feargal Hogan <feargal.hogan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I have downloaded and installed the latest
> stable version and am reviewing it as an
> alternative to ID.
> 
> A few questions:
> 1) Is it suitable for long document production?
> 2) Is the SLA file format documented somewhere?
> 3) Is it possible to import XML format text? I
> note that html import is supported. Do i need
> to convert my XML to XHTML rather than import
> directly? 4) Is there any documentation on
> supported HTML flavours?
> 
> Any assistance greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Feargal
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Feargal Hogan
> m:  +44 7745 817086  |   e:
> feargal.hogan at gmail.com
> <mailto:feargal.hogan at gmail.com> 
> 
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My impression is that the so-called development
version 1.5.0 does much better with long
documents than previous versions. So called
because it is available for several platforms
without recompiling. Reportedly It does have
problems with footnotes and widow and orphan
suppression. If I have those kind of
requirements I use TeX instead. 

In any case I am using 1.5.0 or 1.5.1 (which is
the real development version) for all my work.
SLA (source) files are interchangeable with these
two versions although some 1.5.1 features would
be ignored in 1.5.0 of course. 

When I need to combine two or more pdf files to
make one finished document I use Ghostscript
scripts. For separate files named  segment* to be
combined into book.pdf I use this script:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -sOutputFile=book.pdf
-c .setpdfwrite -f segment*.pdf

This is all one string of course. My mail client
breaks long strings up.

-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
Book layout, typesetting and Indexing
Free list of books for self-publishers:
http://wexfordpress.net/shortlist.html