-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I've successfully built Scribus-Aqua after hacking some portions of my Fink config files (I have some weird issues that prevent me from building freetype from source) and used it to lay out an ad for some forthcoming books from my press. This is a reasonable test project for Scribus, and I used the same project last summer when trying Scribus 1.1.7, I believe.
The good: 1. Simply put, it's just wonderful to have this available natively on OS X. Running X11 on the Mac does add some overhead, and Scribus under Fink, while capable, is a bit sluggish. Getting good open-source software available *natively* where possible will help improve its adoption, I believe. 2. Styled text import! Woo-hoo! I successfully imported an OpenOffice.org Write file. This is such a huge improvement: no more manually formatting raw ASCII text in Scribus. Even better, with NeoOffice-J (the Aqua-native fork of OO.org that mixes a little Java to give native Mac menubars, printing and fonts), I now see an almost all-Mac-native OSS publishing workflow (the exception here is Gimp.app, an X11 package, which I can live with because it's an excellent tool). 3. The story editor is much improved: it's *very* usable now. It was a little rough around the edges last summer and fall, when I last used Scribus in a production setting. 4. In general, the interface seems more refined and polished. All in all, Scribus-Aqua feels like a very robust publishing application. Kudos! Now, the rough areas: 1. I could not export graphics in PDF. Text exported fine, but graphics were blank. It was an easy workaround to print a Postscript file and convert to PDF manually, but Scribus' PDF export is one of its biggest selling points. Is this an issue with 1.3 CVS, or a Mac bug? 2. Scribus-Aqua saw only a handful of my Mac fonts even when I added the font paths manually in preferences. I'm aware there are probably some issues with translating font searches from X11 to Aqua, but I thought Qt could handle this stuff more gracefully. This isn't a complaint so much as a query to see if anyone might have ideas for workarounds: would replacing TrueType fonts with PostScript fonts work better? I just want to be able to use more than Luxi Sans and Bitstream Charter in my projects. :-) 3. Having gone through a lot of pain to get the application built, I can definitely say that having a standalone app bundle with all the libraries rolled in--or, barring that, a pkg installer--is the way to go. There aren't a lot of poetry publishers out there who are also open-source hacker enthusiasts. Next, a few questions, as I'm a bit rusty on what folks have been doing with Scribus in a production context: 1. Are there any scripts/plugins/techniques to generate a table of contests based on text styles? 2. Do template/master pages support automatic page numbering? 3. Can text flow automatically across pages (perhaps with an automatic text frame setup, which I saw was available in the settings)? i.e. if I have a sixty-page poetry manuscript that's been formatted in OO.org, will that import gracefully, or will I need to place text on each page manually? Thanks to Andreas and Martin for breaking the build logjam and getting Scribus patched so it will actually build in the Aqua environment. And finally, thanks to the Scribus developers! - -- Cheers, Kevin Walzer, PhD WordTech Software--Open Source Applications and Packages for OS X http://www.wordtech-software.com http://www.smallbizmac.com http://www.kevin-walzer.com mailto:sw at wordtech-software.com -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCNn5aJmdQs+6YVcoRAk1QAJ9qEG5WoRczzgWJ1lO5UrAUgjf8EQCfWeSO uT95m54Tdh55hEeswoRr3aE= =BLaj -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
