Scribus 1.5.3 appimage - some issues

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asoftwareuser794

I'm running Linux Mint 17.3/KDE.  Scribus is at version 1.4.3.  However when I would load a one or two page PDF sent to me (vendor estimate), some of the text overflowed outside the text box. There were other formatting strangeness. When I saved the PDF, this strangeness was saved.

I installed the 1.5.3 appimage following the link here: https://www.scribus.net/downloads/unstable-branch/.

It loaded the same pdf document correctly. All good there.

Since I found Scribus, I wanted to try it out and I ran into a few things.

1. When I type scribus --version for 1.5.3. I get the same type of info as 1.4.3, by after it lists the version I get:
Scribus Crash
-------------
Scribus crashes due to Signal #11
Segmentation fault

2. I cannot open a pdf file like: scribus FILE.pdf without getting a Segmentation Fault. I can only open a pdf file via the dialog that is displayed after the splash screen and click the tab "Open Existing Document".

3. I cannot open large pdf documents. The progress bar sits at 66% and my machine grinds to a halt.

4. Last, I wanted to print  https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Knowing_Knoppix/Print_version to a PDF. In firefox, I select File -> Print and selected the PDF Cups printer.   I only printed 5 pages, because of the above problem (large pdfs). If I view the document with okular, it looks okay, but if I open the pdf with scribus 1.5.3 the fields on pages 2-5 are black. The PDF-Import dialog shows the file correctly. I even clicked the arrow to check each page, but when I hit OK....wait (the progress bar really liked 66%), only the first page is correct. The remaining 4 pages, every field is black.

I definitely feel 1.5.3 runs better.  Any thoughts, especially on #4.

Thank you.

GarryP

Welcome to the forum asoftwareuser794.

There are some things worth saying:

A. The version of Scribus given by Mint is not - at the time of writing - the right one. Mint 17.x gives 1.4.3 which is old and 18.x gives a weird version that doesn't have colour management. See http://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,2464.0.html for more information.

B. Scribus is not a PDF editor. Scribus is for creating PDFs. It can import PDFs but it should not be used for reading/editing them. Even if Scribus 1.5.x introduces some PDF editing functions they will be experimental at best. If you need to edit PDFs then use something else.

C. Scribus 1.5.x is a developmental branch of Scribus. All the 1.5.x versions are "experimental" and should only be used if you have a good knowledge of how Scribus works so that you know what is a bug from what is normal. The word "unstable" in the link you followed gives a clue.

D. Printing from Firefox to a PDF printer driver really doesn't have anything to do with Scribus.

asoftwareuser794

Quote from: GarryP on June 26, 2017, 10:33:07 AM
Welcome to the forum asoftwareuser794.

There are some things worth saying:

A. The version of Scribus given by Mint is not - at the time of writing - the right one. Mint 17.x gives 1.4.3 which is old and 18.x gives a weird version that doesn't have colour management. See http://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,2464.0.html for more information.

B. Scribus is not a PDF editor. Scribus is for creating PDFs. It can import PDFs but it should not be used for reading/editing them. Even if Scribus 1.5.x introduces some PDF editing functions they will be experimental at best. If you need to edit PDFs then use something else.

C. Scribus 1.5.x is a developmental branch of Scribus. All the 1.5.x versions are "experimental" and should only be used if you have a good knowledge of how Scribus works so that you know what is a bug from what is normal. The word "unstable" in the link you followed gives a clue.

D. Printing from Firefox to a PDF printer driver really doesn't have anything to do with Scribus.

Unfortunately when asking questions at other locations and reading articles, scribus comes up as an option, thus my usage and this question.  In the "Opening Existing Document" dialog, "PDF Document" does appear in the "Files of type" dropdown.  It is also mentioned in the manual, under "Importing Output Formats". I took a leap, if one can generate a PDF, they might be able to read a PDF. 

I did read carefully about the version(s). I can only take what LM, based on Ubuntu, provides.  The doc (snippet below) did say 1.4 and 1.5 could be installed side-by-side. I left 1.4 in place and chose, with caution, to try the AppImage. 

I'm in the directory where I installed the AppImage, made it executable, and got a "Segmentation fault" when I typed: ./scribus-1.5.3-linux-x86_64.AppImage --version

I created a new file and saved it as test.sla. However I got a "Segmentation fault" when I typed: ./scribus-1.5.3-linux-x86_64.AppImage test.sla
But if I selected the "Open Existing Document" tab, selected test.sla, it opened juse fine.

The scribus man page shows it accepts filenames on the command line:
Quotescribus [-h|--help] [-v|--version] [-l|--lang language] [-la|--langs-available] [-f|--file|--] [filename]

This may be a problem with the AppImage.... maybe not passing the filename correctly, because with 1.4 it works: /usr/bin/scribus Document-1.pdf
Maybe the scribus appimage doesn't support the command line, which would explain the segfault with "--version".

As far as the pdf's go. I have had limited success (as you mentioned).  I tried various pdf files, and by that I mean, not created by Scribus. I exported a newly created document as PDF and opened it in scribus 1.5 with no problem.  So it must be how the Cups PDF printer on my linux is creating the pdf file.  The Cups PDF printer must not be creating a "valid" pdf file according to Scribus. 

snippet from https://www.scribus.net/downloads/:
QuoteThe development branch is currently 1.5.x. It's mainly being released for people who want to help us testing and improving Scribus, so the next stable series (1.6.x) will work well. However, as of version 1.5.1, we consider the development branch reasonably stable, so it can be used for serious work by users who accept that not all new features are already working perfectly. Features already available in the officially stable version will work much better in 1.5.1+, though.

It is also possible to install 1.4.x and 1.5.x side by side, so you can work with one version and play with the other.

Thank you.

GarryP

While Scribus can "open" PDFs you probably should only think of that function as a kind of very limited "emergency recovery function" - even for PDFs created by Scribus itself. (I've just tried one of my own very simple newsletters and all of the images were missing and some of the text had been moved.) Scribus does its best to retrieve the information from the PDF but what you get depends on so many things the whole process is very hit and miss. This might change with Scribus 1.5.x - and maybe on to 1.6 - but I can only give advice on the current stable 1.4.6 as that's all I use.

Since a PDF is an output of Scribus it might be reasonable to assume that it can open its own output. After all, GIMP outputs PNGs and JPEGs and it can open them. Unfortunately, as you have seen, it just doesn't work in this case. Think of the PDF as a "final output" rather than an editable working document. A bit like an actual physical object being created by a 3D Printer from a CAD drawing. The PDF is the physical object while the SLA is the drawing.

Importing a PDF into an image frame should work just fine as long as the PDF doesn't use any of the more advanced PDF abilities but the PDF will still remain uneditable. You can do some basic stuff like "masking off" areas with shapes and adding text and images over those areas but it's not the same as real editing.

If you really need to modify a PDF then I can recommend Affinity Designer: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/ It's not open source but it's cheap-as-chips and is a very capable bit of software, far more capable than its price would suggest. (For multi-page PDFs you will probably have to stitch the output back together after exporting the slices but there are lots of ways of doing that - too many to go into here.)

As for the Linux stuff, sorry but I can't help you any further. I'm only a casual Linux user and someone else will be much better placed to go into the technical details with you.

As for CUPS PDF Printer, I've not used it myself but I would assume that most of these sorts of things are only geared-up to produce PDFs as simply as possible and may not be producing 100%-Adobe-compatible PDFs. Even if it was, you still wouldn't be able to open it in Scribus anyway (as mentioned above).

utnik

.pdf is a final document format!

Quote from: GarryP on June 27, 2017, 11:41:20 AM...Scribus does its best to retrieve the information from the PDF but what you get depends on so many things the whole process is very hit and miss. This might change with Scribus 1.5.x...

yes, scribus1.5.x does a much better job in dealing with .pdf files – but it's still no .pdf editor...
QuoteSince a PDF is an output of Scribus it might be reasonable to assume that it can open its own output. After all, GIMP outputs PNGs and JPEGs and it can open them...

well – gim exports .pdf files as well; and scribus 1.5.x does a much better job when opening these files as gimp itself. but as mentioned by gary and by me: .pdf is a final format...

utnik

a.l.e

back to #4: you're doing it wrong.

you should load the html into scribus text frames, chapter by chapter.
then manually add the images.

depending on the way the formatting is done in the manual, you might first load the html into libreoffice, export it to odt and then load that into scribus' text frames.

currently, there is no way to get from an html layout to a scribus document. in some ways this feature could be added to scribus, but somebody has to sponsor (it could work in a similar way as idml works... if we can find out how to break the flow into pages...
images would be included, but at the wrong place.



about the reason why your workflow is flawed: when scribus reads a pdf, it converts the whole text to vectors and this not something you can use. really.