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Scribus => General Discussion => Topic started by: sersha on December 22, 2025, 07:04:21 PM

Title: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: sersha on December 22, 2025, 07:04:21 PM
I found it interesting enough, so I wanted to share the link:

https://typedrawers.com/discussion/5369/dream-big-your-ideal-composition-typesetting-software
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: a.l.e on December 23, 2025, 03:25:17 PM
Interesting read, indeed.

There are a few things that I'd like to see in Scribus (and might be not too hard to add):

Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: Aleks100 on December 23, 2025, 06:25:20 PM
Does 1.7x version have option to knockout shape color and overprint (out)line?
This is very useful for prepress.
It can be solved by copying outline at layer above but this is easier.
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: nitramr on December 23, 2025, 09:53:12 PM
@Aleks100 yes, there is. In Properties Palette (Fill or Line) you can click on the color dot to open the color dialog. There is a 3 dot menu where you can switch between knockout and overprint. Knockout is the default.

@a.l.e
I think we need something like a listener on text changes to render the GREP styles while typing. To keep the calculation activity low, it could listen for the active paragraph only. If the style definition has changed, the whole text must be processed at once. The GREP styles could apply temporary like regular styles to avoid a "recalculation" if the style definition doesn't change, but have to be identifiable as "applied" GREP styles in story text. We can start with a simple implementation for color, size and fontface.

I have some additions to your list. I asked an AI what is needed to flatten the learning curve for beginners and make Scribus ready for professional workflows.

The report contains a lot of useful improvements and ideas:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mUlatITRQXkU-NpIS0w_dDPVgCc0qBda0TrNDpEw8v8/edit?tab=t.0
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: Aleks100 on December 23, 2025, 11:27:54 PM
Both fill and line can be knockout or overprint, but I meant for fill to be knockout and at the same shape line to be overprint.
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: utnik on December 24, 2025, 08:11:10 AM
hi aleks

i know this as 'trapping' (overfilling a shape to avoid blanks).
unfortunately scribus doesn't support trapping, which is usually not a big problem for digital printing but may be a show stopper for offset printing.

you could file a feature request here (https://bugs.scribus.net/).

utnik
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: Aleks100 on December 24, 2025, 01:23:03 PM
For offset, screen... every kind of printing but digital.
However, I prefer to set it manually.
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: utnik on December 24, 2025, 04:09:55 PM
Quote from: Aleks100 on December 24, 2025, 01:23:03 PM...However, I prefer to set it manually.
it's usually not my business, as my work is for digital printing. but i think it would be a good thing to have an editable trapping preset. (editable by selecting which element will overfill and by the amount of the trapping...)

utnik
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: a.l.e on January 02, 2026, 09:35:34 AM
Nitramr, very interesting summary.

If I understand the text correctly, there are a few things that are already in the pipeline (customizable toolbar, epub export), others that indeed are low hanging fruits (icons, dark mode, UI snapshots), and some that seem wrong to me (the story editor is not put forward by Scribus nor opens on double click, welding has little to do with vector editing, drag and drop does work, one can create snippets that can be reused).

But there is one thing that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable: the reports suggest that Scribus should make big improvements for both professionals and for novices.
My fear, is that following this advice will result in new cool features being added to Scribus without really making the users happier.
Personally, I'd prefer a slightly a different approach that has -- in my eyes -- more chances to make Scribus make noticeable progress for its users:
defining target usages that we want to support and make us the best software in the field.

From what I read from the different Scribus forums, here are some of the common usages of Scribus where we have a chance to be very good:


Of course, my goal is not to transform Scribus to a software that only targets one or more of these specific fields.
I'd rather like to use our limited resources to make some of our users really happy, while improving the software for everybody.
And once we've made Scribus good for some users, we can look for further goals.
Title: Re: A discussion about the typesetting software
Post by: Lynn on February 14, 2026, 03:48:48 PM
It's only light thread necromancy this time, so I feel like I'm in the clear. The reason I use Scribus is that it is the only desktop publishing program which is officially supported on Linux; I use it for typesetting novels for hobby bookbinding. For non-Linux hobbyists, the alternate choice is usually Affinity Studio now that it's available for free.

My needs overlap somewhat with professional book typesetters, but not completely (since it's a hobby, I'm willing to put a lot more time into any given project; since I am self-printing only a few books a year I make designs much more complex and image-rich than a typical paperback).

Two of the things discussed above would be enormously helpful to me: Contextual paragraph and character styles, additional hyphenation rules to prevent hyphenating the last word of a paragraph.

Most people in my bookbinding club use Affinity Publisher for typesetting. We were talking over the various features that Scribus and Affinity have and there are a few that Scribus has that are actually big plusses over Affinity for books.

A lot of the Affinity features I think are unecessary if you typeset "traditionally" (making a design first, editing your text before importing and then applying the design to the finalized text as the last step). But there's also some features that they have that sound really convenient:

Most of the features Affinity has would be a pain to implement, but I figured people might find the perspective from my hobby interesting. I attached some slides I made for a group presentation I was giving with pros for each