Scribus 1.4.5 erratic behaviour

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ValerieJS

I am using Scribus to publish our quarterly magazine of 20 pages in CMYK.  The December issue in Scribus 1.4.4 worked with no problems at all, except for the steep learning curve on my part.

I upgraded to Scribus 1.4.5 before starting work on the March edition.

There are two frustrating issues:

When I am reviewing, editing and saving I am finding that the program freezes.  Apart from the indication that I am on a particular page I cannot select items or edit them.  Sometimes Scribus corrects itself after a while but on other occasions I have to close the programme and start again.  This is particularly annoying when my editor, by phone, and I are going through the magazine making corrections. 

This morning while we were tidying up the magazine Scribus just shut itself down with no warning and for no apparent reason.  The mouse pointer was nowhere near any closure buttons.

Any help you can give would be much appreciated as Scribus is an impressive program and a great advantage to our charity which could not afford InDesign, Quark or similar.

Thank you in anticipation
Valerie

GarryP

Hi Valerie.

I've been using 1.4.5 on OSX for a while now and haven't noticed any problems but I've not been doing anything particularly taxing.

Without seeing the problem in action it's a bit difficult to say what's wrong but you could check the following things:
* What's your memory usage like? Are you getting to the machine limits? If you're reaching a limit Scribus may have an issue with its memory management that would need looking at.
* What images are you using? Are any of them really big and you didn't notice? If they're massive it could cause any number of problems.
* Are your fonts okay? Do they have any kerning table problems or anything like that? A decent font manager should show up any problems.
* Is your clipart "clean"? Sometimes SVGs can cause problems if they've not been created properly. Try putting them through Inkscape first.
* What other software are you using at the same time as the Scribus failures? It might be that something else is actually causing the problem. (Not very likely but worth checking.)
* Do you have any background processes going on? Backups/updates, that sort of thing. They could be causing issues. (Again, not likely.)
* Do you have any attached devices that go to sleep? Some external drives can cause long pauses when they wake up.

Sorry I can't give any specific help but the sort of problems you're having are notoriously difficult to track down to their source without much info.

It's possible that a console trace might help the developers pick up on the problem better but how you'd get one depends on your OS.

Kunda

Hi ValerieJS,

Sorry to hear this.
If GarryP's helpful troubleshooting don't solve your issue, then I suggest going to the next step:


  • Open an account and start a bug report on http://bugs.scribus.net
  • step by step explain what you did to recreate bug (so we can) (if you can make a screencast and attach that via a dropbox link or something that would raise the odds of it getting fixed faster)
  • Upload the .sla file (option:you can mark the bug 'private' so the general public can't see the bug and only authorized users can, if this is an issue)

ValerieJS

Thank you, Garry and Kunda, for your help.  I will investigate further and bear in mind your suggestions.

best wishes
Valerie