Thanks for answering the question I posed in my first comment. We could have saved all that time calling me stupid for asking about this and wanting it. This is a much better job of "selling" scribus.
That does work. I just tested it. It has some minor issues - the transparency is not rendered in the onscreen document when you get a pdf into an image frame, so adjusting positioning is a little tricky but not something that can't be overcome by being careful. That may be something that can be worked on, WYSIWYG is a "nice to have" and would make the program that much more user friendly, but not a huge obstacle for me.
Transparency does render properly (gradients included) in the final produced pdf, so any adjustments to positioning can be done by simply reexporting the pdf after making them.
As far as "your time is more important than the time of the developers... You want them to spend time on writing features so you can save time"...... yes my time is important, and yes, I want them to spend time on writing features that save time, since that is exactly what I do when I produce software, and it is what my customers expect me to do. Software is used if it works for them and saves them time, and not used if they have to work for it and it costs time.
Thanks again. As I said above, it's a good program. This makes it much more useful, and even professionally usable if the color issue can be addressed satisfactorily, which shouldn't be a problem for others and it isn't for the application I have.
I'll take a second look and do some more testing before shelling out money for InDesign, but it now looks more likely that I can use this in production.
• In this attached rendered pdf the "s" border is on the background (base) level. The image is wider than the border but has a transparent background, and is placed into a transparent frame one level up from the background. The base level has a white background so you will not see the transparency grid in this pdf.
• The final rendered pdf is flattened and is print quality 300dpi because all images inserted into the scribus template and document made from the template were 300dpi, including the template background which is a jpeg with the s border on it.
Notes:
• Under File->Preferences->External Tools->Image Processing Tool - Scribus' default image processor is GIMP. For people like me who are comfortable with Photoshop for image production & editing, you can change this to Photoshop or any other graphics program
• Under File->Preferences->PDF Export->Color set "Output intended for" to printer
• Under File->Preferences->Preflight Verifier I set "Lowest allowed resolution" to 300dpi