Some very basic advice

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LMLOScribe

Before I spend time and effort, perhaps someone could advise me:

I have a long (600p 8x11 singlespaced) ms with scores of graphic boxes, tables (some of which span several pages), and facsimiles, written in WordPerfect X5 (far superior to MSWord for long and complex documents!). I have spent literally days/weeks formatting it in WP for PDF and publication, and now have to redo it because of revisions. Images skitter around, seemingly erratically, or even disappear. Getting rid of widows and orphans, etc., keeping the images more or less in place rather than using "See image on p.", and producing a professional-looking book is a priority. Clearly a program designed for DTP should be better.

I've opened Scribus (and it certainly looks good!), but have not pursued anything much so far. There seems to be no way of inserting text from WP (and reformatting in Word will inevitably change a great deal), least of all with the boxes and tables, etc., relatively intact.

Any comments?

Should I even try to pursue using Scribus for a document aleady in an advanced state? Keep it for the next book (but then how to import WP files?)

Sorry if this seems premature, before I've really explored the program.

AH

Nermander

#1
Don't use Scribus, because you seem to want automatically updated page references and things like that and Scribus can not yet handle that.

With Scribus you work with frames, each frame stays where you put it. But there is no way to automatically reference frames, or have frames move together with the text.

Also 600 pages is more than Scribus can handle without getting sluggish, you need to split your work into smaller files and join the created PDFs.

LMLOScribe

OK. Thanks. Of course it is in smaller files, but it's useful to know before too much effort that there are other issues.

AH