Package: scribus-ng Version: 1.3.5.dfsg~svn20090208-2 Severity: wishlist I started using the scribus package, got confused, and went to Inkscape augmented with emacs. As things still bug me when working with scribus-ng, this report against scribus-ng. The other thing, is that the scribus project doesn't actually want to get feedback. Yes, I've visited the website, the wiki, and the interface to the mailing list. I am not going to read N years of posts to a mailling list to see if what I am observing has a solution. If nothing else, put a search engine on that mailing list archive!
I've played TeX, LaTeX, DocBook, XSL-FO and a few other things. The document I wanted to design was strange to any of that, and so I looked first at scribus. I was hoping to have a 2 page document: on the first page a "diamond" with labels, similar to a watermark, in a large font size (64 point) in a colour. One the second page, a triangle with labels (again 64 point) in a colour. Since a triangle leaves half of the page underoccupied, I had other stuff in the empty half, again with the coloured watermarks in 64 point. DTP often looks like CAD, and both Inkscape and Scribus seem to follow that observation. When I do CAD, I prefer to calculate where things are going to be, rather than move stuff around with a mouse until it looks correct. Which is how I started this in Inkscape helped by emacs. The initial document I started from in Inkscape was very simple. It had data pertinent to the document, and a tonne of junk peculiar to Inkscape. Most of this "fluff" was deleted. Consequently, Inkscape started the document design, but essentially the complete document was designed in emacs, and only used Inkscape to display it at various points. I will readily admit, this is not the method most people involved with DTP would use. However, I have edited PS and PDF documents produced in the past by LaTeX or TeX with emacs. I knew to begin with, that this document was mostly about text, and not much about graphics. And to try and set up the initial quadrangle (diamond) in Scribus confused me. I did not ask for the rectangle to have a filled diamond inside it. How am I to know that the diamond filling is actually there, or not? It just confused me, and so I went to Inkscape to start things. Fine, I like Palatino (aka URW Palladio). Too many times in the past I have been warned about using anything that looks like Times Roman in any document which might have to go between UN*X/Macintosh to/from M$. I would never set Times Roman as a default font family for a page. But the thing that really bugs me after a couple of days with fighting with scribus and scribus-ng, is that there does not seem to be a way to get scribus to quit changing the font family. The SVG document is explicitly using URW Palladio, and when I import it, everythign seems to be changed to Times Roman. Thinner font, of course all the string lengths are now wrong. But why? URW Palladio is among the fonts which Scribus has access to. Why does it need to change the font used in a SVG document, to something different from what is used, even though the font in question is known? I gather 1.3.6 is supposed to look at SVG import issues, but I cannot see anything about when 1.3.6 might come along. A road map is nice, estimates of times is nice too. It also seems that Scribus kerns glyphs differently than Inkscape. You line something up properly in Inkscape (using a before text anchor, which is the default), and import it into scribus and it doesn't line up. I suppose using a text-after anchor would work better, but at this point I would expect those kinds of anchors to not be supported in Inkscape. :-) The document I am working on, needs to have colour. Black and white or even greyscale won't cut it. Scribus would display the page to me in colour, even a print preview showed colour. Anything I printed came out greyscale. I realize that most DTP actually need colour management. This application of mine doesn't. All I really wanted to avoid is any part of the more or less common red-green colour blindness. The only solution I found, was to export as PDF, and then get kpdf to print the document. The only two colours I was asking for was "blue" and "red". It is not like I was being particular about what blue. I have installed a bunch of stuff related to colour profiling, and I will attempt to get colour printing from scribus working the "proper" way. I twould be nice if some default existed, so that for those applications where colour doesn't matter much, that you can actually get a colour print. Even if it isn't perfect. Having played with HTML, CSS and XSL-FO to varying extents, I can see how text really doesn't work well in SVG. Which is why I was hoping to come up with a SVG approximation in Inkscape, and then import it into Scribus as I didn't understand why the quadrangle I produced has to have a dark interior. Printing black text on a dark blue background doesn't work well in anyone's mind (well, some websites seem to thing that is a wonderful combination). Scribus seems to be oriented towards producing PDF. Which is why I first looked there, and then hoped to import SVG into it. Ummm, I can see where this can really work in the future. But things are still a little clunk now. Again, this is wishlist. These are just comments about how things work now. As the Scribus project doesn't feel fit to have a mechanism like this to make comments, I thought this was a reasonable alternative. I only have the 1 document to produce, and once it is to my liking I may not visit scribus for a while. Hopefully the next time, SVG import works properly. But I suspect that the initial quadrangle setup might not have been showing what I thought it was. But who knows? -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.26 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages scribus-ng depends on: ii ghostscript 8.64~dfsg-1 The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF ii libaspell15 0.60.6-1 GNU Aspell spell-checker runtime l ii libc6 2.9-4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries ii libcairo2 1.8.6-2 The Cairo 2D vector graphics libra ii libcups2 1.3.9-15 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - ii libfontconfig1 2.6.0-3 generic font configuration library ii libfreetype6 2.3.9-4 FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib ii libgcc1 1:4.3.3-5 GCC support library ii libjpeg62 6b-14 The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG ii liblcms1 1.17.dfsg-1 Color management library ii libqt4-network 4.4.3-2 Qt 4 network module ii libqt4-xml 4.4.3-2 Qt 4 XML module ii libqtcore4 4.4.3-2 Qt 4 core module ii libqtgui4 4.4.3-2 Qt 4 GUI module ii libstdc++6 4.3.3-5 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3 ii libtiff4 3.8.2-11 Tag Image File Format (TIFF) libra ii libx11-6 2:1.1.5-2 X11 client-side library ii libxext6 2:1.0.4-1 X11 miscellaneous extension librar ii libxml2 2.7.3.dfsg-1 GNOME XML library ii python 2.5.4-2 An interactive high-level object-o ii python-tk 2.5.2-1 Tkinter - Writing Tk applications ii python2.5 2.5.4-1 An interactive high-level object-o ii zlib1g 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-13 compression library - runtime Versions of packages scribus-ng recommends: ii cups-bsd [cupsys-bsd] 1.3.9-15 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - ii cupsys-bsd 1.3.9-15 Common UNIX Printing System (trans ii gsfonts-x11 0.21 Make Ghostscript fonts available t ii icc-profiles 1.0.1-4 ICC color profiles for use with Sc ii xfonts-scalable 1:1.0.0-6 scalable fonts for X Versions of packages scribus-ng suggests: ii scribus-template 1.2.4.1-2 additional scribus templates -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". 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