The more I tried to use Scribus, the less it worked

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Kelly

 :-X

I need a program that works in linux and will allow me to create a newsletter. I thought this would be the answer. After spending a day watching video tutorials, searching for answers to my ever growing mountain of questions, I finally had to give up.

I started by watching a tutorial on how to create a page, text boxes and image boxes. That was simple enough. The properties toolbar was very useful. So far so good, I felt like I would have the hang of this soon. Next I was interested in the story editor, and found another video to watch. I watched it all the way through, then restarted the video with story editor open on my screen so I could go through the steps, stopping and starting the video.

This is where my problems began.

The promise of creating stylesheets lured me in. I am a big fan of stylesheets. Unfortunately, when I tried to save a stylesheet, for some reason I didn't have the same features as the video tutorial. "No Style" never appeared in the side bar like it did in the tutorial. The more I tried to work with the story editor, the less it would do. When I got to the point where I couldn't even get the text in the text box to center, I gave up.

Fine, I won't use the story editor, I'll just stick to creating text and image boxes on the page itself.

Except, now for some reason half of the icons that were in the tool bar in the main program were gone.

I had to use the drop down menu to create the text box, but when I tried to type inside it no cursor appeared. Nothing I could do would bring back all of these necessary features that I had used before trying to use the story editor would become available on the main toolbar. Finally, after wasting a day trying to to teach myself how to use this program, I closed it down.

What a shame, it seemed like it would be just what I needed. Back to LibreOffice,

a.l.e

why did you not ask about a good way to learn scribus?

but, yes, i agree: we need better tutorials for getting started.

the floss manuals one is not bad (http://write.flossmanuals.net/scribus/hands-on/) but it's probably not enough.

on youtube (and elsewhere) there are so much bad (old) stuff.
the biggest problem being that most of the learning material has been created by well intended beginners and do not show good practices... but they hacks after having had the same starting issue as you did.

GarryP

It's worth sticking with Scribus if you can give it some more time Kelly. Once you get used to it you'll find that it's much more powerful than LibreOffice for DTP work.

I haven't watched many of the Scribus video tutorials but most of what I have watched are not very good. That's not to say that there are no good video tutorials, it's just that the ones I have watched (or partly-watched before switching them off) aren't really very good or especially useful for beginners.

Personally I prefer textual tutorials in general as:
* they can contain links to further reading when new concepts come up;
* I don't have to keep pausing and skipping back.

But that's just me. I'm sure there are some good video tutorials out there.

As for the Story Editor, don't use it for most things. It can come in useful for some specific work but it's not very useful in general. Specifically, the Story Editor does not show the formatting that has been applied; it always shows the text the same way. Stick to editing the objects directly where you can see the formatting. (A tutorial that tells you to use the Story Editor probably hasn't been created by someone who knows what they are talking about, or it's so old that it's probably next to useless.)

I'm not sure what you mean by "stylesheets" as Scribus doesn't have a concept of a "stylesheet". It has Styles which can be used to format text and shapes; it has Master Pages which can be used to apply page backgrounds; it has the Scrapbook which can be used to create standard layouts; and it has Templates (which are not much more than normal documents saved differently), but it has no "stylesheets".

I don't know why some of your toolbar icons have gone. I don't think Scribus can do that without specific user interaction. Don't worry though as you can get them back by right-clicking an empty space on the toolbar and checking the tools you want to see.

You can only type inside a text frame after you have double-clicked it. Just clicking a text frame only selects it (unless you are already editing another text frame, in which case the editing will move to the newly-clicked frame).

Does any of this help you to give Scribus another try?

Kelly

Quote from: a.l.e on January 24, 2018, 10:07:01 AM
why did you not ask about a good way to learn scribus?

but, yes, i agree: we need better tutorials for getting started.

the floss manuals one is not bad (http://write.flossmanuals.net/scribus/hands-on/) but it's probably not enough.

on youtube (and elsewhere) there are so much bad (old) stuff.
the biggest problem being that most of the learning material has been created by well intended beginners and do not show good practices... but they hacks after having had the same starting issue as you did.

Thank you for the link. This actually has images, which will be a big help. This seems like it would work much better for me than Libreoffice. I am still trying to get text to wrap around an image with that program.