hi murray it's really nice that you are trying out scribus and from what i know about scribus, you should be able to achieve your task with it.
but: you shouldn't forget that this program is still a work in progress, that there are only few persons programming it and all of them are doing it in their free time. > Somehow, Scribus really does not keep track > of all the operations, and selecting undo (especially using <CTRL>Z > or <Command>Z on the Mac) can have disastrous results, such as simply > crashing the program. in 1.3.3.x the undo engine is still far from complete. the current svn version has a new action recorder (iirc) *and* most actions can be undone (the greatest and important exception are -- afaik -- the text editing) i wonder if in 1.3.3.x an alert should pop up the first time a user undoes something. > A couple other things: I find it to be quite slow. This is just an > annoyance and if I break a document into sections that have less that > 20 pages, it isn't too bad. for now this is the way you are supposed to work with scribus: break up your .sla in sections. and this fact won't change in the near future. > The PDF files are REALLY bloated. > However, I can deal with this with the script, > compress-newsletter.pl, which has been posted earlier -- it reduces > the size by as much as a factor of ten with no noticeable degradation > in the viewing or print quality that I have been able to detect. this is the way it is supposed to work! you get a pdf wich is "perfect" for printing and won't have any issues -- ever -- when printing... but if you are concerned with file size you can shrink it. it would be nice to have both options inside of scribus, but then i guess that we would have more people asking why their smaller pdfs show errors when printing. and since scribus is mainly thought for printing, i guess that the status quo is ok. > I hope that someone will be attempting to fix these things in the > next "stable" release that is put into the (K)Ubuntu/Debian > repositories. well, i think that you should use the current stable in (K)Ubuntu/Debian, which is 1.3.3.12 on my debian... have fun a.l.e
