Scribus for technical "paper" document

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seb.astien

I'm trying to find the most adequate tool for writing technical documents (from 10 to 200 pages). The document shall have a given layout (on a template) and has a lot of table and figures that is going with the text.
My concern is on the ease of use of Scribus - as I'm not familiar with and the other users won't be either, but we are willing to learn  ;D.

I've used word processor (like word and LibreOffice), and I have a bit of experience of Latex (quite old however), and framemaker (in a previous position). My colleagues are more Latex side - apart from word.

I've tried a bit those days, and my fear is on the way we can manage the figures and tables. On a word processor, the tables/figures are more or less following the text on which they are attached. On Latex, it even better as the text flows "around" without having holes but keeping the element as close as possible keeping a good looking document.

Is it possible to do such "floating" but anchored elements on Scribus?

I would like to avoid to redo the page layout each time we add some text here and there.

Do you have some advice (tutorial, experience, ...)?

Thank you

Sebastien

a.l.e

if your environment is using latex, i would try to use that : - )

scribus can be used for the task, but you must be aware that images are mostly placed in a fixed position and won't follow the text as you delete and add your content.

flowing around text is possible (and easy) in scribus.
anchoring images to text is somehow possible but i don't think it scales in the way you want to use it.

seb.astien

Thank you ale,

My point here is that until the document is managed by young engineer that are comfortable with Latex, this is not a problem.
But there will be other person involved, as some reviewers, that are are not fluent in Latex - I'm myself a bit rusty  :-[.

So I was looking for a more visual replacement.

Word/LibreOffice are doing part of the job, but the result is quite ugly.

Still need to re-assess framemaker.

utnik

hi sebastien

what about lyx as a frontend for latex?

utnik

digirew

If your looking to build beautiful technical documentation I highly recommend you take a look at Sphinx.

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/

You build all your docs using reStructuredText and Sphinx handles the rest.

You can export to html etc.

You can use something like https://readthedocs.org/ to host all your docs, and get pulled directly from github etc.


a lot of popular open source projects utilize Sphinx as its very powerful and easy tool.