[Tfug] Followup [Re: Desktop Publishing Software]

[Predrag Punosevac]

I was not participating in previous discussion but sounds to me that
you are better of using Latex/TeX:-)  If you are putting that much
effort you might as well learn real thing.
Predrag




On 11/8/07, Claude Rubinson <rubinson at u.arizona.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
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