[Tfug] Followup [Re: Desktop Publishing Software]

[Andrew Ayre]

One of his requirements, I believe, was a system that someone else could
take over after his stint is done.

Predrag Punosevac wrote:
> 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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-- 
Andy
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