Scribus, or beating dead horses

[Clay]

Over a year ago the Linux DTP package Scribus was mentioned in these fora as a tool not ready for prime time. In that year Scribus has come a long way. I installed it this afternoon and found it to be a much better package than the version I checked out so long ago.

Has anybody used Scribus to publish their game, and if you have would you be willing to discuss your experiences. I'm particularly interested in its strengths, and what other tools you've used with it as part of your publishing process.  If possible, I'd like to mention your project in an article that I hope to write for some Open Source friendly publication.

[efindel]

Well, not quite, but... I used Scribus to start converting Capes to PDF, before the author had a PDF version.  I did about six pages as a sample and sent it over to the author, who replied that he'd already begun converting it to PDF himself, so I abandoned the project.

I was using a beta version of Scribus 1.2, and had problems with some recurrent crashers.  I haven't tried it again now that 1.2 is actually out as the current version.

My main prior DTP experiences had been with Ready-Set-Go on Macs about fifteen years ago, then a few years after that with PagePlus on Windows.  Scribus is definitely as good as either of those was.

The biggest problem I had with it was automatic rescaling of the fonts -- if I increased the size of a text box after putting text in it, the font size would be increased proportionately.  There's probably some way to stop it from doing that, but I didn't dig in and find it.

A second problem is that it imports plain text only.  You can then add italics, bold, etc -- but there's no way that I found to take text that already has those things and import it in a way that preserves them.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

After my iBook busted itself up old-style today, I had to evaluate how to layout my game in the next two weeks. I'm using Scribus, and so far, it's not half bad. I did download the latest version from CVS, and it's a good step over version 1.2.

The best new feature: importing text from OpenOffice documents, complete with formatting. This is a life-saver.

The worst problem: frames on master pages with text-wrapping set have absolutely no effect on pages they're applied to. I have to manually draw an invisible box around my page numbering on each page to make text wrap around it. That's not a tremendous pain, just a minor one.

The PDF's it's creating are beautiful, though.

[Clay]

I haven't done any big projects with it yet, although I'm hoping to use Scribus to generate handouts for Saturday's game session.  I do agree that it makes gorgeous PDFs.

[efindel]

After my iBook busted itself up old-style today, I had to evaluate how to layout my game in the next two weeks. I'm using Scribus, and so far, it's not half bad. I did download the latest version from CVS, and it's a good step over version 1.2.

The best new feature: importing text from OpenOffice documents, complete with formatting. This is a life-saver.

Cool... that answers my biggest complaint, since OpenOffice will import a lot of different formats.  For that matter, you could probably make a macro in OpenOffice to apply styles based on *fake ascii bold* and _italics_.

The worst problem: frames on master pages with text-wrapping set have absolutely no effect on pages they're applied to. I have to manually draw an invisible box around my page numbering on each page to make text wrap around it. That's not a tremendous pain, just a minor one.

Heh... I didn't even try the master page functionality, when I was using it.  I did do some fancy text-wrapping around graphics in a semi-manual way, though... put the graphic where you want it, turn off text wrapping for its frame, then draw shapes over it with text wrapping around them.  Make the shapes have transparent borders and fill, and then group them with the graphic, and you've got custom wrapping around your graphics.  :-)  Of course, a real function to do it would be nicer, but at least it works.

The PDF's it's creating are beautiful, though.

Yep.  And I like the options it gives when generating PDFs.