No frame display - bug or feature?

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DavidHawkins

Hi, I have been using Scribus with no problems for a few months now. I have just installed the latest stable version 1.4.2 on my wife's macbook running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), and after about half an hour of use all of the grey frames around text boxes and image frames have disappeared. I don't know if I did something or if this is a bug, but it's very frustrating!

'Show frames' does not have any effect on the problem - the grey frames stay invisible, although it does show and hide the black 'X' that displays in empty image frames. 'Preview mode' works as expected when turned on, but the frames still don't show when I turn it off.

Can anyone shed any light on what might have happened? the frames display as expected on the other two mac systems I have been using Scribus on.


GarryP

David,

I reported this issue in January - http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11388 - and it's apparently, if I've read the issue history properly, been fixed for the 1.4.3 release (which could be soon but I don't know a date as yet).

The problem is a bit of an annoyance but hopefully those, like us, that are affected by it won't have to put up with it for much longer.

(If you're desperate for a fix and are okay with compiling your own software you could try 1.4.3svn from SourceForge but personally I'm just waiting for the official release.)

Garry.

DavidHawkins

Thanks Garry, I really appreciate the input. I can get on with using it in the knowledge that it'll  be fixed eventually and it's not something i've done wrong. I'm not desperate enough to dust off my programming skills and attempt to compile from source yet.. especially as i'm not familiar with programming in the mac environment. I'll see how it goes.

GarryP

You're welcome.

As a temporary "fix" you might like to think about adding sample text - in a language you don't normally use, so it stands out - to text frames when they're created. That way they don't get "lost". (The amount of times I've been distracted and then had to hunt around for an invisible frame I couldn't say. I'm easily distracted.)

If you do this, you might also try changing your default style to something "horrible" - e.g. bright red Comic Sans 30pt, or whatever - so it's easy to see where your "unused" frames are. You can then change the style to a "proper" one when you come to edit the frame. (It's worth noting that the font in the default style is automatically added to any PDF that is generated with embedded fonts. This may or may not be an issue however.)

On a more general, but related note, I think it would be great if Scribus had a "find empty frames" feature for document clean-up purposes, and others have asked about it on the forum, but whether it becomes a feature in the future I couldn't say. Maybe if the Outliner gets a makeover at some point?

utnik

#4
the 'preflight verifier' checks for empty image frames – it could do the same for text frames as well...
...i'll write a feature request.

utnik


just done: http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11504

GarryP

That's great utnik, thanks.

And in the meantime I'll try and reintroduce myself to the Preflight Verifier.

For the simple stuff that I normally do Scribus produces great results whatever I do so I generally ignore the Preflight, but I guess I should be looking at it more closely since it's there to help me. So thanks for a reminder about that too.