Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

[Posted November 16, 2010 by ris]

Linux Journal attempts to demystify Scribus. "Designed for desktop publishing, Scribus is a specialty application, and not intended for general use the way that OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice is. Unlike a word processor, it is not intended primarily as a way to input text -- although you can use it for that -- but as a layout program for manipulating groups of objects for the printed page. With this orientation, it is perhaps closer to The GIMP or Inkscape, which can be disorienting to the general user."

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 16, 2010 23:05 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (7 responses)

GIMP is a good example; Ardour is another:

Sometimes, powertools break the standard Human Interface Guidelines for very good reasons of use efficiency. This often drives new users nuts if the people who created the software don't warn them -- and the better read on development, the more righteously indignant you're likely to be; I fear I sorta ticked off Paul Davis and a couple other Ardour people when I first tried to learn it... until I figured this out.

But the old saying: if you're going to break the rules, make sure you have a good reason... exists for a good reason.

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 17, 2010 11:59 UTC (Wed) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] (6 responses)

There is absolutely nothing mystifying or non-standard about the Scribus user interface. It closely follows the paradigm set by DTP software. Someone who has worked with PageMaker, Quark XPress or InDesign will grasp quickly. The real problem seems to be that typical Linux/Unix users are entirely unfamiliar with DTP and graphic design.

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 17, 2010 12:14 UTC (Wed) by MortenSickel (subscriber, #3238) [Link]

Or in fact, most people... They open a DTP excepting it to be Openoffice writer or MS Word on steroides, get confused and irritated and gives up the program.

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 17, 2010 12:29 UTC (Wed) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

My wife wanted to like it, but she was too used to MS Publisher.

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 17, 2010 13:45 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (3 responses)

There is absolutely nothing mystifying or non-standard about the Scribus user interface. It closely follows the paradigm set by DTP software.

From the article it appears that Scribus still has the separate editing window for frame text. Although this may be like the products you mention, Scribus originally permitted the direct editing of text in frames, similar to the user interface of early- to mid-1990s applications such as Impression and Ovation Pro (on the proprietary but somewhat widely used RISC OS platform).

Although dedicated text editors are nice things to have, when a tool is supposed to broadly support an immersive editing experience where edits can be rapidly visualised, separating the editing experience from the viewing experience is pretty much taking the user back twenty years to applications running on 680x0-based Macs which didn't have the "grunt" to permit much else.

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 17, 2010 16:02 UTC (Wed) by Rob (guest, #29265) [Link] (2 responses)

Scribus allows editing of text within frames by double clicking in the frame - at least it did when I last used a pretty
up to date version a few weeks ago. Perhaps the promised future Linux Journal articles will cover this?

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 18, 2010 18:36 UTC (Thu) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] (1 responses)

All professional DTP programs have in-frame editing and separate frame text editors - in-frame editing for quick adjustments, the separate editor for major adjustments without continuous reflowing of the text delaying work.

(Again, the comments here are the proof that the Linux community is not familiar with DTP. The complaint about a separate frame editor is comparable to a DTPer complaining about having to compile C programs rather than having them directly executed like Javascript.)

Navigating and Working in Scribus (Linux Journal)

Posted Nov 18, 2010 23:46 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Again, the comments here are the proof that the Linux community is not familiar with DTP.

Well, maybe this particular member of "the Linux community" thought that the provision of separate frame text editors as the primary input method - the only supported input method in the last version of Scribus I tried (which was admittedly a few years ago) - was as archaic as people believed it to be when products like Impression were released at the end of the 1980s. And yes, I know about text reflowing delays: I made the mistake of writing my degree dissertation in Word and having it want to slowly repaginate everything every few seconds, and it isn't even a proper layout program; I should have learned LaTeX back then rather than later on. The people who wrote Impression were well aware of the performance issues, although their rabid adherence to assembly language programming didn't always contribute to their product's stability.

Oh, and on RISC OS you could at least drag and drop content in and out of frames if you wanted separate editing facilities, although the formatting language in Impression was somewhat poor. I go on about this from time to time because there are plenty of areas where the major desktop platforms compare quite badly even to archaic platforms.