Scribus Forums

Scribus => Beginner Talk => Topic started by: PiperCub on May 29, 2013, 07:46:20 AM

Title: VISIBLE text when moving frame?
Post by: PiperCub on May 29, 2013, 07:46:20 AM
It will be good to have the text within a frame visible, when moving the frame. How do I do that?

(Now text disappears within the frame, when I move this)

Thanks
Claus
Title: Re: VISIBLE text when moving frame?
Post by: GarryP on May 29, 2013, 02:01:03 PM
Claus, I don't think it's possible to get Scribus to show the text in a moving frame. I've never seen an option for it anyway.

I'm curious as to why you would like to see the text when you move a frame.

Is it just for aesthetic purposes or is it so you don't have to keep dragging and dropping to see what the result would be?

If it's for the latter reason I think it would take quite a bit of programming work to achieve this because of the need to calculate where each character in the moving frame should be depending on what bounding-boxes/contour-lines/hyphenation-options/optical-margins etc. are on the page and in the frame. And then there's the question of whether you also redraw any linked frames too. And so on...

I'm sure I've not listed all of the potential problems but you probably have some idea of why it might not be an easy thing to implement.

I think it would be great if Scribus had the option to do what you want but it's probably a bit of a low priority compared to other stuff the developers are working on. Personally I'd prefer the dev team to concentrate on making Scribus rock-solid on the stuff it already does well rather than adding extra complexity, but that's just my opinion.
Title: Re: VISIBLE text when moving frame?
Post by: PiperCub on May 29, 2013, 02:47:13 PM
Yes, it is so that I don't have to keep dragging and dropping to see what the result would be. Must admit finding this a bit annoying. It is probably because I come from QuarkExpress and InDesign. They both have this feature as a standard - and I seem to remember having seen it working in Scribus too sometime?
Title: Re: VISIBLE text when moving frame?
Post by: PiperCub on May 29, 2013, 02:58:52 PM
Let me state that I like Scribus a lot and that I' m most grateful for the effort. If this feature is not possible at the moment, please think of this as a suggestion for a future version sometime.
Title: Re: VISIBLE text when moving frame?
Post by: GarryP on May 29, 2013, 04:09:45 PM
It's possible that Scribus did display text while dragging at some point in the past but I've never noticed it since I started using Scribus a couple of years or so ago. Maybe one of the more experienced users can say for certain.

My only suggestion which you could try is if you are only moving your frame a little bit you could try using the "nudge" feature.

After selecting what you want to move, pressing an arrow key will move it/them in that direction by 1 point. Use Shift+Arrow to nudge by 0.1 points.  (It's Shift on OSX, it may be different on other OSes, I'm not sure.)

Also using Alt+Left expands the frame by 1 point on the left while keeping the right edge where it was. The same goes for Alt+ other arrow keys but in their own direction, if you know what I mean. (Again, it's Alt on OSX, it may be different on other OSes.)

It's not what you were after but if you're only making small adjustments it's a basic work-around.

((Just in case there's any confusion in the mind of any readers, I'm not affiliated with the dev team; I'm just a normal(?) user giving his opinion based on his own programming experience. What I said above about the difficulties in implementation may be completely wrong. I was only trying to explain - maybe badly - that what might on the surface seem like a simple thing may, in fact, be very difficult to achieve programmatically.))

Anyway, I hope your frustration with this part of Scribus isn't enough to put you off using it often.

And, finally, I'd like to add my gratitude to the dev team to your own. Without their stirling efforts I'd be hundreds of pounds out-of-pocket so I try, in my very small way, to give something back by answering forum questions where I can. It only seems right after all.
Title: Re: VISIBLE text when moving frame?
Post by: PiperCub on May 29, 2013, 06:52:53 PM
I tried mowing the text frame with the arrows, and it worked very well for me - Thank you very much Garry, not missing anything any more, hope it lasts a while  :D

I'll go on using Scribus for sure. First because I like it a lot and second because I'm tired of "Robbery by daylight" form established commercial players. In fact, I'm moving my own commercial activities into the open source arena now (http://www.windmission.dk - quite another story).