[scribus] I have objects bigger than my page and I cannot see them entirely

[ZASKE Martin]

Hi list,

I am doing a holiday-hobby project for an anniversary on Thursday-night:

Some simple animated ants carrying stuff, and a proverb.


I designed my ants in Inkscape and had prepared and tested a script for
Scribus (with dummy ants) for moving them.


Now I am stuck with a "trivial" problem:

My "stage" is my page, custom size 100 x 100 mm


My ants will walk through the stage in an endless procession. Therefore
I created 20 different ants and grouped them, the group is 800 mm wide.

I will move this group - by script - across my page in small steps, and
export a bitmap with each step. This has worked with dummy boxes before.
(GIMP will convert this into an animated .gif with two simple commands.)


What is my problem? I cannot see my ants! Scribus lets me move only so
much to the left or right of my page. Even though I have this long group
of ants (selected).

This has got something to do with the "scratch space" maybe? I searched
help and I googled and found several scratch space related bugs (are
ants bugs?).

I tried increasing my scratch space - and it stopped at a funny maximum
of 352,778 mm on either side. So I cannot see, what I have got at x:
-500 mm. But I need to work with all those moving legs for my ants
(check them visually) and place the props (food items) which they will
carry in my animation.

Even funnier: When I first imported my SVG objects, I could go all the
way to the left, I was preparing groups of legs as far as -2400 mm and
could see them.

Now after lunch break, having re-opened my document, it feels locked
somehow to the page and small surroundings.



So:

- What exactly (technically) speaking is this scratch space?

- Is the scratch space really the reason, why I cannot scroll further
left? Or zoom further out?

- Are there work-arounds please? (Yes, I need to install Blender and buy
expensive books and take weeks of tutorials and learn the craft of
animation... But this will not happen before Thursday-midnight) I just
want to move some objects from left to right across my Scribus-page; is
there hope or do I need to bury this idea?

- Are there external or historical reasons, why Scribus is limited
space-wise? Is the PDF format (preferred export) limited? I just tried
making a huge page and stopped at 1000 x 1000 meters (not mm), no
problems for the actual pages. I can see the need for huge pages,
because in the port of Hamburg I have seen printed banners of several
hundred meters width.

- But then why so limit the working space around the page? Even while
writing this, I can imagine several other reasons, why users might want
to prepare or test or temporarily store stuff just off the visible page.
Maybe if there has to be a scratch space for technical reasons, it could
be limited to a multiple to the page-dimensions, not to an absolute
limit of only 350 mm?



- Now, since I am working with vectors: Would it help, if I scaled down
all my objects over all four layers to a fraction of their size and also
scaled down the page? Is there a safe way to select "everything" and
reduce the sizes without loosing the relative positions?
	
I tried it and learned this:
	
- When selecting many objects and re-scaling they all get moved to some
top-leftest position, bah.

- When clicking select-all, only objects on the page get selected (not a
complaint, just an observation)

- When I select and group and then re-scale, things stay properly
positioned towards each other. (Funny enough, while moving my mini-ants
back towards my page I made a comma-typing-error and could go and see as
far left as -74000 mm (like before my lunch break).

- So having created a mini-stage seems my work-around for the moment.




The panic is gone, I will be rather busy until Thursday night, with my
first humble stop-motion animation.

Your input, answers and observations regarding the scratch-space and the
display-area and your personal work-flow regarding larger objects (which
maybe bleed over several pages or whatever) are welcome.

This is not a complaint, I just got rather nervous, when I was entirely
blocked half an hour ago.

Martin






-- 
ZASKE Martin
responsable GʊGʊ
BP 50 - Bassila - Bénin
tel GʊGʊ 66.66.11.11
tel pers 97.44.62.95