"undo" acts weird

[wiccer]

Hi,

I've recently got down to learning Scribus, hoping I could produce some nice-looking booklets with it. Everything seems to work just fine, but there's something fishy about the "undo" button (or, in fact, with Ctr + Z shortcut, or picking "undo" from the Edit tab)!

In short, mostly it just won't work; sometimes it will undo three actions out of 10; sometimes it works with a huge time lag; once, when I used it intensively to see what happens, it froze the software.

Is there something wrong with or am I doing something wrong with it? (Though I have no idea what, honestly).

I run 1.4.1 version from the "stable" repository on a 64 bit Ubuntu 12.4. It's a quad-core system with 8GB of RAM.

The efficiency of this feature is fundamental, as people 1) make mistakes, 2) keep experimenting. Is that a bug? And if so, will it be rectified in newer stable/unstable versions?

Actually, now that I checked it, Action History does not work so great either...

Regards,

Wojtek

 

[a.l.e]

hi wojtek,

the undo has got extensive and intensive care this summer by one of our Google Summer of Code stunden (thanks Pierrick!!!).

small glitches will be fixed in the 1.4.x series if you report them to the bug tracker (http://bugs.scribus.net).
the undo has been first introduced for 1.4, so it's still in infants stages in the current stable version.

but we mostly care now, is that the undo works perfectly in 1.5.x (and in the future release 1.6!). if you want to help out, install 1.5.0svn and test your issues in there (there is a daily built PPA for 1.5 on launchpad...).

have a nice day and  thanks for your understanding!
a.l.e

[wiccer]

Thank you for the answer. I did download 1.5., where undo works somewhat better.

Am I right in saying (based on what I see in 1.5. unstable) that in 1.5. stable there will be no "undone" in:
a) story editor,
b) arrange pages?

Point a) is an issue since this is were much work is to be done. What other functionalities will the lack of "undo" affect?

While we're at it, when you work in the story editor, is it possible to display various formatting characters in it? What I mean are, e.g., separate types of symbols for different sorts of spacing between words?

Also, more to the point, when will, realistically speaking, 1.5. stable be launched?

I do like Scribus very much and I would like to promote it among fellow students in my DTP class, but they will give me funny looks if I tell them they have to get used to not quite perfect CTR+Z.

Wojtek

[a.l.e]

a/ don't use the story editor if you don't 100% need it. it needs a rewrite and it won't be for tomorrow. i can't say more than that :-(

b/ if there is a bug in the undo for arrange pages, please submit it to the bug tracker! this will be fixed as soon as possible.

outside of the story editor, all actions must be undoable! (and in the SE it should be as good as possible).

for the release of 1.5: i was hoping for spring 2013... but the latest trends seem to show that it will slip again... we will see what happens!

all in all: if you see undo glitches that can be reproduced (outside of the SE), you're bug reports will be very welcome! under certain circumstances even for 1.4!


ciao
a.l.e

[wiccer]

Thanks once again.

Damn it! I was hoping that Scribus has finally entered the path of "quicker development" than in the past.

Is that maybe possible for the Scribus team to launch a crowd-funding campaign using the kickstarter platform or something of the sort? If the delay boils down to money and getting some developers to do the job...

I recall the campaign started by Kdenlive video editor - which, with all due respect, is much, much further from being a reliable, let alone professional, tool than Scribus is. They collected twice what they needed for their two-month re-factoring project, producing nothing in return even by this day.

I'm sure that Scribus, being so much more useful and having little competition in the open source world, could easily fetch far more!

Good Luck!

Wojtek

[a.l.e]

hi wojtek,

yep, the pace of the development has increased... but there are (imo) still some little problems to solve...

we will see what will happen, but until now throwing money at the problem does not seem to solve it.
(we have had some money to spend on the development and it has been very hard to spend it!)

ciao
a.l.e