Am 15.11.2013 22:12, schrieb john Culleton: > The question is, how does Scribus support the typesetting of > mathematical formula. The render icon (looks like a gear wheel) > will allow you to create a frame that can be used to access > LaTeX.
I think this is just a workaround and not really suited for a good typesetting software. I hope that at some point Scribus might support native formulas. > > If you have lots of formulae you might consider typesettng your > document in TeX instead. Your choices are pdftlatex (most > popular), pdftex (simplest) Context (my choice for nonfiction) > and luatex or lualatex (with Context allows widest range of > fonts.) But the problem is that Latex is, well, not really the same as a DTP software. It is good if you are writing strictly linear texts without any design, but if you want to design magazines or some visually more appealing books, it is not really suited. Also, imho, Tex has some design flaws dating back 30 years and is just not modern anymore (especially unicode, multilingual support, graphics etc; needing packages for almost anything beyond basic typesetting). Therefore I strongly hope that Scribus will at some point in the future be a good alternative to Latex for scientific documents, meaning writing long documents with mathematical formulas. I can imagine that Scribus would also offer some markup language like Tex, which can then be compiled using the Scribus engine or be imported in a Scribus document and doing some manual corrections afterwards. For example, setting the page settings in the file header (where are text frames, where should the page numbering go etc), writing the text in Latex/html similar style for showing paragraphs, font formatting, including mathematical formulas, defining picture and tabular environments etc. Afterwards, load this into Scribus and the page will be set up automatically. Similarly, Scribus could offer a dual view with source code and preview, showing the texts in the source code in a live view. Some often used things could be implemented with Python scripts or some easier script language, therefore offer the same functionality as Latex packages do (Although Scribus should try to implement as much core functunality in Scribus as possible). This could then be much more simpler and cleaner than Latex Code, but more suited for people who want to write in this fashion and not in WYSIWYG style.
