[Tfug] Followup [Re: Desktop Publishing Software]

[Claude Rubinson]

Hi all,

Just wanted to give y'all a brief update regarding my experiences with
Scribus.  The upshot is that I've been able to create my first
newsletter with little prior training and it looks half-decent.  Plus,
it seems that there are a lot of capabilities that I haven't yet taken
advantage of; I expect that as I learn the program my layout skills
will improve and the development process will streamline.

Documentation seems so-so.  There's little documentation on the
website, with the wiki being the primary source of activity.
Personally, I've never been a big fan of wikis for documentation: in
my experience they tend to have holes, indexing is
poor-to-nonexistent, and navigation sucks.  I haven't yet delved into
the wiki a great deal but, so far, that's been my experience here as
well.  Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties for me is that all of
the documentation seems to assume that you're already an expert in
layout: that you know what you want to do and that you basically just
need to know how to do it.  I need some links to "desktop-publishing
for dummies."  It doesn't need to be Scribus-specific but I need to
spend some time learning about what I'm trying to do and I wish the
on-line documentation would help out here a little bit.

As to the program itself, it's got a number a bugs.  First off, it's
slow, slow, slow.  Every time I switch to the workspace that it's on,
it has to re-render everything; the more pages I add, the longer this
takes.  Print preview is even worse.  Also, it does a few things that
I don't understand and, at a minimum, seem absurd.  For example,
sometimes (I don't yet know what the pattern is) I'll go to save.
Instead of immediately saving the project (which is what it usually
does), it'll notify me that "The project has changed since the last
time you saved" (or something along those lines).  !?!  When I confirm
that I do, in fact, wish to save, it saves the project and then closes
it!  This behavior is so absurd that I have to assume that I'm doing
something odd on my end.

Finally, while it seems very powerful, it suffers from the
all-to-common problem of forcing you to engage it's complexity.  It
doesn't (at least by default) remember last-used settings and doesn't
seem to have sensible defaults.  A lot of tutorials that I read
include statements along the lines of: "if you want to format your
text box in two columns, do X, Y, and Z.  Now you'll have to change
your gutter space."  I'd like a newbie-mode that would pick sensible
defaults for me.  I suspect that I can do this via templates but the
tutorials I reviewed didn't include much info on templates, the
templates that I saw didn't seem like they'd work for my simple needs,
and the program, itself, doesn't include much in the way of prefabs.

As a contrast, I'll say that I just needed to some very basic editing
of an mp3 file (basically, extracting a snippet).  I Googled around
and found Audacity which also appears very powerful but is incredibly
intuitive and newbie friends.  Without having to look at the
documentation at all, I discovered that it could read in an mp3 file
(I assumed that I'd need to covert to wav or raw or something), click
around a bit to select from within the wavestream (Or whatever it's
called--you know that they've done something right if you can
accomplish your task without learning the terminology), zoom in and
out of the wavestream (for more detailed work), extract out the piece
that I wanted, and apply a variety of transformation.  Within an hour,
I had accomplished my task, learned a little bit, and wasn't
frustrated at all.  Audacity also had some nice techniques of
assisting a newb such as myself; the best example is that it
incorporated a very subtle "snap" technique where it snaps your guide
to the crest of the part of the wave that your working with.  It's a
very weak snap and you're not forced to use it but it really
simplifies things on my end.  Frankly, it's the best "snap-to-grid"
implementation that I've ever come across as most are too greedy.

Scribus, on the other hand, forces you to do everything yourself.
There are definitely places where I'd like to adjust the spacing
between overlapping text boxes (see? I had to learn what Scribus
called them) but can't figure out either (1) how to do it or (2) what
the best way to do it is.

So, there are definitely a few warts in Scribus for somebody like me.
As I gain proficiency with the software, my hope and expectation is
that these warts will go away or that I'll understand why their not
actually warts.  All that being said, however, in a matter of days,
I've been able to create my first newsletter and it isn't completely
hideous.  And it deserves kudos for that.

Claude