Hello, Scribus gurus: Over the past two months I took a major plunge and decided to discard Windows/Microsoft Publisher and give Ubuntu and Scribus a serious try. For the past five years my main job using Publisher had been to produce booklets we call 'Daily Bulletins' at bridge tournaments in the Pacific Northwest region of Canada and the US, at our annual huge tournament in Penticton BC, and smaller ones mostly in Seattle and Vancouver areas, with a few visits elsewhere.
These publications are produced OVERNIGHT, with about 6-8 hours between the time I receive the data from the day's play and the time I hope to get it to a copy centre in pdf form. The publications are monochrome-grayscale, in booklet form on legal size paper (with a cover page of some bright pastel colour, which means page 1 and 2 are actually 8.5 inches tall and 3 inches wide) and range from 12 pages at a small tournament to 24 pages in Penticton. You can see my work (the most recent one in Spokane was done with Scribus) at this website: http://www.matchpointer.com/db.htm I bought the Scribus manual and even purchased an inexpensive laptop and installed Ubuntu alone on it. My old laptop (about 5 years old) also came with me to Spokane with only Ubuntu installed, but while in Spokane I had to quickly install XP on it to use a new bridge hand duplicating machine requiring Windows. (Go see www.dealer4.com if you're interested...I had no time to test it in WINE) The plan was to use this smaller tournament to get accustomed to Scribus and Linux, solve the issues that proved unsolvable in Spokane upon my return, then the real test would be in Penticton this June, where the publications are twice as large... I'm pleased to be able to say that my overall impression of Scribus, after using it in a pressure situation for one week, is favourable, and most of the stuff I write below is perhaps more applicable to a newcomer looking to try out Scribus as I did, rather than a request for improvements. In most cases, I was able to find a solution to the problems that cropped up, and could look forward to streamlining the process in the future even better. I will need to take some serious looks at my own workflow before the next tournament, and I am confident that I can improve it quite a bit. But as one might expect, the first time through was a bit of a highwire act! I have Ubuntu 9.10 and Scribus 1.3.5svn (Ghostscript 8.70) installed. It's quite possible that many of these concerns have already been addressed, but Ubuntu doesn't have a newer version. Here are some major concerns: 1) Booklet printing. I think I have this one licked, but it is going to take some serious explaining to get your average copy-center worker to follow the procedure in section 8.4.3 of the manual. It would be a lot more convenient to incorporate booklet printing and imposition into the PDF export section of Scribus. Under pressure, I made a silly decision to make full legal size pages with the imposition done myself, so my pages were 12-1, 2-11, 10-3, 4-9, 8-5, 6-7. This worked with the FedEx Office people, but I found it time consuming to convert this to a normal order on half-pages to post a web version (in fact, as I write the first draft of this, I have one more to convert, two days after the end of the tournament, with e-mails wondering where these issues are!). I think with a little experimentation with my own printer I can write a document detailing how to do the imposition within Acrobat Reader for the Penticton people. But it would be a lot easier to have Scribus able to make the printer-version as a PDF export option. 2) Escape is impossible from the Master Pages dialog box! This one drove me so nuts that I abandoned making master pages and just made a separate rectangle and draped some text on top of it for the bottom of each page. Once you hit Edit/Master Pages, the dialog box that comes up (Edit Master Pages) has no exit button. The only way out, once you have created the Master Pages that you want, is to exit the program and restart! I must be missing something here, but whatever the solution is, it is far from obvious. What is needed is a exit button on that dialog box that saves the master pages you have created and returns you to editing the document. 3) "Copy of" paragraph styles are a major hassle. I often have a paragraph style that for just one instance I want to centre instead of justify, or make bold instead of italic, or change the text size slightly, or whatever. If Scribus feels honour-bound to keep each of these once-only styles as a "Copy of" style, that's fine, but please put them at the bottom of the list, so that I don't need to wade through them to get the styles that I actually use. 4) Tabs in Style Editor. I make pretty extensive use of all kinds of tabs in displaying result data from the various types of bridge events. I spend a considerable amount of time converting the raw data from the bridge scoring program to formatted data with tabs. We need to have a look at creating styles and setting tabs. Comparing to the Attributes box's XYZ section, this is the difference: --In the Attributes Box, we see numbers like this: 0.2444 in --In the Edit Styles area, we see numbers like this in the tabs section: 0.2453800000000000000000000000000000000003452349256 in I know what I find easier to work with. Yet, when I tried to edit the tab specs, often I would edit the above meganumber to '0.25 in' and click elsewhere, and look back to find that it was suddenly something like 67.234347194582..... 5) Story Editor Problems. In general, I like the Story Editor far better than editing a story directly. It works well for multiple edits, you can update and see the changes right away, even in a long story that carries over several pages, and for the most part it seemed to work well. I'm actually quite surprised at this: when I started using MS Publisher I did not own a copy of Word and the word processor within Publisher was the most powerful word processor I had! A few problems I faced in Scribus's Story Editor: --I had a paragraph style that called for 2pt type on 3pt leading, that I used without any actual text, to create small spaces quickly. When I wanted to center two lines with one or two intervening small-space lines, I would select the text from the start of the first to the end of the next, including the small-space lines, and click on the center button. This invariably changed the size of all the text within the selection to 2pt. Other attributes remained the same. This badly needs a fix; it's inconvenient to have to select each line separately and center. --I was forever clicking on the styles for individual paragraphs in the Story Editor to change the style for that paragraph. Selecting the text for multiple paragraphs and changing the style only changes the listed style for the first. This needs to be corrected. --'Underline everything' does not seem to include tab spaces. Most of my game result headings look something like this: Score MPts A B C Thursday Open Pairs (13, 14 tables) These columns are for a pair's score, the masterpoints they have won by finishing at their final rank, their rank in strat A, B and C (in tournament bridge, all pairs are eligible for strat A, but only pairs with less experience are eligible for the lower strats, which have their separate rankings and masterpoint awards), the names and cities of the players (under the name of the event in the header line), and (on the header line only, on a right-tab) the number of tables playing in the event. The whole header line should be underlined, but Scribus insisted on this: Score MPts A B C Thursday Open Pairs (13, 14 tables) ----- ---- - - - ------------------- --------------- It actually looked worse with the partial underlining than it did without any underlining, so I gave it up and went without for the week. But I would like to get it back. (I am aware that there are different underlining options, and I think I tried all of them.) OK -- that's enough to get started. I have a few minor issues as well, but I'll let you get started with this stuff. Thanks in advance for your help and support. -- .-------------------------_--------------------------------. | Bruce McIntyre | email: ooga at shaw.ca | | 9541 Erickson Dr, #1103 | "OO-ga-shaw-ca, OO-ga-shaw-ca" | | Burnaby BC CANADA | Editor -- www.matchpointer.com | | V3J 7N8 604-438-9735 | (ACBL Unit 430 Web Site) | }-------------------------^--------------------------------{ | Yamaha WX5 wind-synthesizer virtuoso-in-training | '----------------------------------------------------------'
