We have completed the first issue of the Bargain Hunter using Scribus to do the layout. It's much nicer for this purpose than OpenOffice.
Next week's issue of one of the papers created by Scribus is here: http://www.thebargainhunter.net/ladders The Regina paper was laid out using OpenOffice. The Parkland paper was laid out using Scribus. This is actually the "subscribers only" webpage for the next issue. This URL will be released to the subscribers on Monday, and the actual physical paper will be for sale in the shops on Wednesday. There are a couple of issues with the Parkland paper, one major and one fairly minor. The minor issue is the most obvious on the first page. Note that the text in the Countryside Motors ad on the front page is messed up. That text is just fine before the .sla document is saved, but when you reload the .sla it's messed up again and has to be fixed. I didn't fix it this time so you can see what it does. The major issue is scrolling speed. The way that the paper is laid out currently is as follows: 1. All of the commercial ads are placed approximately where they go in the finished paper. 2. The classified ads are imported in a big single file (html this time, probably OpenOffice format next week after I have a chance to change the database to do that). Scribus performs really well as long as only the commercial ads are on the pages. After the classified ads are imported, Scribus turns to molasses. The scroll speed makes the program almost unusable; the problem that this creates is that some of the commerical ads have to be moved after the classifieds are in place. Some of the advertisers want their ad to always appear along with the farm equipment section, for example, and we don't know exactly where farm equipment will be from week to week as the size of the classified sections varies quite a bit. The upshot of this is that I am told that laying out this paper took over ten hours on a 2GHz Athlon machine, due mostly to the scrolling speed. (This is about a twenty-minute job on OpenOffice.) Apparently, it was fastest to delete all of the classified text, then move the commerical ads, then re-import the classified text and do that over and over again for each page of the paper -- that was the quickest way to move around between pages. The paper isn't "perfect" this week because we basically ran out of time and had to get started printing. Do you folks have any suggestions for a way that we could set up the paper that would improve the scrolling performance? For example, each page is currently a single large text box with five columns; would it be faster to make five single-column text boxes instead? Or is there another way that we can link the thing? Or anything else that we can try?
