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#41
Free discussion / Color me pantone
Last post by AdmFubar - June 10, 2025, 11:20:28 PM
#42
General Discussion / Re: The future of DTP Software...
Last post by crlMIDI - June 09, 2025, 09:53:55 AM
LinkedIn was too intrusive for me to login to it.

At first, I intended to ask a technical question in the appropriate place on how to modify the code in the preamble of a LaTeX Render Frame: either the relevant documentation is very hard for me to find, or it was never completed.

All I wanted to know is how to declare my language(s), for example with \usepackage[french,spanish]{babel}, and to select one of the fonts in the basic set that's native to LaTeX. An incidental advantage of this arrangement is that you can easily manage as many languages as you want in a Scribus document.

However, my difficulty with finding how to configure the Render Frame, perhaps symptomatic of something, reactivated a train of thought that's been bugging me for a long time. Scribus is unique on the free* open source (FOSS) DTP scene, but there are aspects that would better be managed, not by extensive development, but via better integration with other FOSS software.
* A usable version of the popular online Canva costs around 100 euros/year unless you're a registered non-profit association.

If you type some right-left justified text in a Scribus text frame using the default style settings, it doesn't look very nice. Scribus does provide all the adjustments a professional typesetter would have used in earlier times, but nowadays applying these line by line recalls an old-time beginner programmer punching software in binary machine code. LaTeX does typesetting automatically to a high standard, though you can still diddle the parameters.

That's one reason why various Render Frames were introduced into Scribus: here, you just input your text in the frame using LaTeX markup. True, the beautifully justified text does currently appear as bitmap in the PDF file. However compared to the alternative of inserting the text as PDF or vectors (via Inkscape), you can adjust the frame to the page, just like any (rectangular) text frame. Above all, anyone relatively inexperienced can make last-minute alterations to a newsletter (for example) without knowing how it works.

LaTeX text frames need an implementation installed on the computer (I use Texlive), but this is easy to do and it runs transparently in the background.

There seems to be a general impression that Render Frames are not worth further development because they are not much used, which may simply be a consequence of incomplete documentation for adjusting the settings. Other than LaTeX, various Render Frames come with preset settings, for example LilyPond (music scores), which is part of the LaTeX ecosystem.

Fully integrated with LaTeX is the powerful graphics package TikZ (tikz.org ; texample.net), which is extensively documented with plenty of examples, and which does things (even simple ones)  Scribus and Inkscape can't do. With TikZ you have to type your code (plenty of templates are available), but I must emphasise that what looks like a steep learning curve soon becomes surprisingly easy.  You can also convert from SVG (Inkscape...) to TikZ code. A major and useful enhancement would be to fully integrate TikZ into Scribus, using the vector objects. In the meantime, please could we have updated documentation for the Render Frame approach?

There's also the question of linking stuff from Scribus back into LaTeX, for example when fine placement of text and images needs an artist's eye. Regarding layout of the complete document, with left-right page margins, numbering, running titles, and all the rest, Scribus is at best disappointing and you have to do a lot by hand. With LaTeX you may not even have to think about that, and in addition, the markup code provides an easy and above all reliable way of including bibliographic references (essential for much scientific, medical and technical work), as well as cross-references to figures and tables. If you're writing a book, however short, it's far easier to do it in LaTeX unless placing images and other objects is critical; we need to be able to transfer items and document between the two, without hassle. That means ensuring both applications have access to the same font sets.

Learning curves and ease of use: all FOSS software in the field covered by LaTeX, Scribus, Gimp and Inkscape requires some learning effort. This should not be an obstacle to doing things well, which is why I present the case for better inter-operability. LibreOffice should be included, but I leave that for another time. LaTeX is exceptional because of its very widespread usage among authors, researchers and journal editors of all kinds; hence the huge number of templates to download. The commercial online LaTeX service Overleaf has a visual editor alongside the code editor, which allows a very inexperienced user to work on an existing document; two people can work together remotely, which is fun. A free Overleaf subscription is limited only by the compilation time for a given document; we got kind invitations to pay rather a lot when our current novel got beyond 400 pages, but it compiled all the same at 450 pages. You can compile for free as many short documents as you like; the code and PDF can be downloaded and/or stored online.  I often download code to work on my PC using Texstudio, one of the available FOSS front-end editors for Texlive (you install the editor after Texlive).
#43
General Discussion / Re: May 2025
Last post by a.l.e - June 06, 2025, 11:32:50 PM
mmm...

i'm not sure that having them in alphabetic order is a good idea.

but a better order and some separators might help.

and, at some time, we will probably need a search system...
there are too many options in there and it's often hard to find them.
#44
General Discussion / Re: May 2025
Last post by AdmFubar - June 06, 2025, 10:30:12 PM
Would like to see one other small teak made to the preferences panel. Can the left column of list be sorted alphabetically? Would make finding the desired options easier.
#45
General Discussion / Re: May 2025
Last post by a.l.e - June 06, 2025, 06:42:21 PM
It already happened in June:

  • ...

Open tickets with pending patches:


Tickets with "simple" tasks:

Scripts to be created
#46
General Discussion / May 2025
Last post by a.l.e - June 06, 2025, 06:39:31 PM
Last week, a few us attended the Libre Graphics Meeting.

In the forums there is a short report about our achievements there.

As a bonus, you now get the group photo: try to guess who are the four Scribus developers!

lgm-group-photo-2025.jpg

The Scribus code also improved: On top of many bug fixes, we also got:

  • Three changes to the Scripter:
    • Setting the page of a PDF loaded in an image frame: getImagePage(), getImagePageCount(), setImagePage()
    • Add a "cut_text" argument to unlinkTextFrames()
    • Add itemDialog() with a simple dialog with a dropdown / combobox
  • In the preferences, it is now possible to enable and disable multiple fonts at once.
    font-activate-context-menu-patch.gif
  • The .sla file format has seen some clean up, to make it more readable to humans
  • The rotation of items now access negative values (Scribus will use and display 360 minus the value entered)
#47
Beginner Talk / Re: Scribus 1.6.4 Using ...
Last post by Nermander - June 05, 2025, 01:52:22 PM
A template is as far as I understand essentially just a saved document that is used as basis for a new document (so you don't accidentally overwrite the template).
#48
Beginner Talk / Re: tekenstijlen in lettertype...
Last post by a.l.e - June 05, 2025, 10:35:36 AM
If you don't have strong reasons for using the story editor, you're supposed to edit your text and apply the styles in the frames.

The Story Editor used to be an important tool in Scribus, but it has not been so for over a decade now. 
Sadly, many beginners tutorials have not caught up, and still present the story editor in the first few steps.
It's a power tool (in bad shape) now.

Indeed, the Story Editor is still usable for some specific tasks that needs it (like editing a short heavily rotated text frame) but is mostly useless for its original goal. 
There are plans for rewriting it, with a new purpose. But it seems that nobody has a urgent need for it.
#49
Beginner Talk / Re: tekenstijlen in lettertype...
Last post by cb - June 04, 2025, 04:13:00 PM
I made three screen shots: Style editor that shows that shows that the letterfont of the alinea style is Palatino, 10.00 pt; the story editor that shows that the alinea style is applied to al paragraphs; the main window with the text that shows that the letter font is Arial 12.00 pt.
When I change in the style editor other characteristics like alignment and when I click apply (toepassen), these changes immediately take effect, but all changes in font style don't
#50
Announcements and Forum Rules / Re: Scribus 1.6.4 Released
Last post by Dogil - June 03, 2025, 09:52:25 PM
Can't find the AppImage to download. Most pages are very outdated.

Found it here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribus/1.6.4/scribus-1.6.4-linux-x86_64.AppImage/download

The link to the Debian install instructions points you to version 1.4.