Ease of typographic mods

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bryandavis

Hello all. I am trying to switch from Quark to Scribus but am at a hurdle. It seems that things I do to correct text in my layouts are extremely labor intensive to do in Scribus. I mean things like changing a single word to bold, kerning a couple letters in a headline, cheating on leading by 2/10ths of a point to get a page to fit, tracking a line to fix the rag. All of these are single key command and very fast to accomplish in Quark. They appear to require multiple mouse clicks and moves, new paragraph styles and all A LOT of effort to accomplish in Scribus. Am I missing something, or, is Scribus just not up to my demands for fast work in a typesetting realm?
Thanks in advance for your input.

a.l.e

you're observation is right:

scribus has not been created with "for fast work in a typesetting realm" in mind.

(it was more: "make a rock solid thing that produces PDFs that can be professionally printed at random print shops")

but we are working on it!

  • i started working on adding shortcuts for bold and italics (but i have no planned delivery date yet; and i'm not sure either that i will succeed)
  • there are ideas on how provide fast access to setting the glyphs spacing and width (but it probably won't be the complex keyboard shortcuts you know in quark express)
  • in the development version you can create styles from the content palette
  • there is a patch for applying styles with the keyboard (the only missing detail is: the keyboard shortcut to be used; the same approach (or even the same tool) might be used for kerning and spacing)

so, i think that we are not there yet, but there is hope...

finally, if you have specific ideas for things that you think would be "easy" to change or that are a deal breaker, you're welcome to share how you would want them to be implemented!
no promise that it will be done (in the way you are proposing), but you will be read : - )

bryandavis

Thank you very much for your insight and response. I will consider how to best share any opinions on what would help me (and perhaps others) produce needed results from Scribus. For my personal page layout software, for now, in order to meet my needs as a typesetter, I will have to stay with QX. I think Scribus software is a great solution for DTP and fills a void in the need to move toward opensource solutions. Thanks again. -B

AdmFubar

I wonder if you could implement a kind of "scrapbook" of styles that could be applied/collected via an eyedropper tool? just a rambling thought.
Using Scribus 1.5.8 & 1.6.2, openSUSE 15.5
Advanced hobbyist

a.l.e

for what i am concerned, i'm waiting for

0017162: [PATCH] apply style "shortcuts" based on the "action search" tool
https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=17162

to be merged and then we can start thinking how to integrate that with adding shortcuts for additional text formatting.
the typographic ones included.

we will need to find out what needs to be cover:

  • which formatting should be applied with the keyboard (theoretically all of them!)
  • how to make it easy, to apply the most important ones?
  • do we need similar shortcuts for other types of content?
  • ...