Automatic new pages

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nikgervae

Hello, I am an old-time FrameMaker user and I am checking out Scribus. I have not yet found a way to have it automatically add a new page when the current page's  text frame fills up. This was trivial in FrameMaker so I'm at a bit of a loss. I've been through the online wiki docs and not spotted anything yet.

toyotadesigner

Just start a new document with i.e. 50 pages, set up the text frame(s) in the »Document Setup« and then paste your text. As soon as all text is importet, delete the empty pages at the end of the document.

nikgervae

Paste my text? I need to write my text. In FrameMaker, I would start up with one page, and as I wrote, I got new pages added, no hassle, no fuss. I don't know ahead of time how many pages I'm going to write. if I have to add a new page manually every time I hit the end of one, it's going to be a real hassle to write & edit anything using this program.

toyotadesigner

Scribus is NOT a text editor, it is a page layout program.

Use a simple text editor to write your story, copy all content and insert it into the text frames of n pages as explained above.

nikgervae

I did point out in my original post that I was coming from FrameMaker, which does both text editing and page layout (and more) quite well. Scribus's name is derived from Latin for writing, and its icon is a pen, so one could certainly expect someone to think it would some support for writing.

It just amazes me that this fundamentally broken workflow model—in the literal sense of a break in flow—persists, where any revision of text requires a laborious transfer and reapplication of formatting, cross references, checking for overflow, and more.


toyotadesigner

So why didn't you keep your FrameMaker? License too expensive and Sccribus for free?

Scribus is an Open Source application, so you had a chance to test it. Now you notice that you've expected more features and start to complain — why? You can delete it and continue using FrameMaker.

BTW, I grew up with hand lead type setting. We wrote the story and then set the type. We learned to estimate the column lengths based on column width and letter types and point sizes, used a type ruler, etc. and of course had to reset the letter types if the editor (the person) wanted a modification. So, at least for me, Scribus resembles the old-fashioned, very logical and bulletproof way of designing printed material. An even more elegant way to design printed material is Tex or LaTex, where you write your story and then use some sort of markup language to specify every single parameter of your document. Later we learned how to use the Linotype Hell photo type setting and laser phototypesetting, until the personal computer age with lousy software took over.

OK, this was just a brief look back into recent history, when there was nothing like »point and click« or »copy and paste«.

Misleading logotype? What about the childish google logotype, pretending it's a nice and colorful kid's company like the children of Bullerby, but in fact is the most brutal advertising company on earth? Want to send your complaint to google as well?

a.l.e

hi nick

in scribus 1.5, you can get something close to automatic text frames by creating the empty pages and then using

item > duplicate / transform > multiple duplicate > by page

to fill them with text frames linked to the current one.
you can do that a few times with a sane number of pages and at the end delete the pages that are "empty".

or you can create a document with "automatic text frames" but, normally, i advise you against using that, since it's not very flexible.

ciao
a.l.e