How well does Scribus handle long-ish publications (version 1.4.5)

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dagoss

I've read in a few places that Scribus starts to choke when working with a layout that has a lot of pages. For this reason, I've seen a lot of suggestions to split long docs up into multiple .sla files. A lot of these sources, however, are citing older versions of Scribus.

Is there a "danger zone" with page limits (or number of objects/amount of text) in recent versions of Scribus? Or is this not really a performance issue any more (and more of a usability thing when trying to manage a 100+ page file)?

utnik

hi  dagoss

there's no fixed value for your 'danger zone' – it depends on the content of your file and on the ressources of your computer.
for a proyect of more than 100 pages i would either suggest to work on a fast machine with a lot of ram or to split the file...

utnik

LymeSimon

I know this is an old-ish topic, but just want to share... I've been using Scribus for a couple of years now and I'm currently using 1.4.3 svn on Ubuntu 12.04, AMD A4-6210 APU (Core i3 sort of performance) with AMD Radeon R3 Graphics (laptop, slow) and 8GB RAM. I have only found problems with Scribus performance when I have massive text blocks. I usually create a set of linked text frames for a single chapter, say 1-20 pages. If I go over this I get grey screen pauses of around 20-60 seconds... under this and it works speedily with no lags when I ctrl-T or update frames. I have happily  and successfully produced 300 page books in a single sla file, so if this is an issue with 1.4.5 then I suggest you do some quick experiments with an empty 300 page doc, then link in 20-30 pages worth of text and check again, building up to maybe 100 pages. Knowing the limits of a system is (for me) the key to avoiding frustration... don't ask it to do what you know it will fail at! For me, Scribus rocks!

(Oh, don't ask why I'm using 1.4.3... that's for another thread!)

Cheers LymeSimon

toyotadesigner

I have published several photo books with text with some 150+ pages in total. Scribus 1.4.4 and 1.4.5 on an 8 year old iMac 8.1 (24", 3.1 Ghz, 6 GB RAM, SSD Drive, OS X Mavericks through El Capitan). Most of the images are 16bit TIFF, 300 dpi and full page size. Loading the document takes a while, because the images must be loaded from an external FireWire 800 drive, but once loaded, Scribus is running smooth without any hickups.

Generating a PDF/X-3 also takes a while, because the images in the document have to be resampled - most of them are considerably larger than page size and I am too lazy to scale them before inserting them into the pages.

End of last year I have published a 50 page reference book with text and images on 350 g/m² Chromosulfat carton. Page size: 46 x 32 cm = 18,1 x 12,6 inch. Width when opened: 100 cm = 39,4 inches = 3,28 feet.

Most of the images I used were scanned images from a large format camera at 13.020 x 8.680 pixels, 16bit, color profile ECI RGB 2. The result is awesome: https://beefoto.wordpress.com/2016/03/04/muster-buch/

Just to prove that even if you have an old but 'clean' machine with below average RAM and an old CPU you can rely on Scribus.