Servant wrote: > Next, if Scribus can stop redrawing the entire > file when you input type, and add imposition, it > will be approaching a usable, real world DTP app!
While I do see the redraw issue as troublesome, I'm not sure your approach is entirely helpful. As for imposition, at work I use (many copies of) a three and a half thousand dollar (AU$) DTP app that lacks not only imposition, but any decent support for non-latin text, reliable font handling, opentype, PDF export, etc. I'm not going to pretend there aren't issues with Scribus, but the lack of built-in imposition would not constitute one of them in my book. A plug-in for simple imposition (for those printing at home) would be nice, but anybody doing serious printing and imposition will be using an external tool to impose PDFs anyway - usually a VERY expensive Acrobat Pro plug-in. Good print-shops should also have such tools. Support for professional imposition would be unbelivably cool, but I must say I think the lack is very, very far from a show-stopper for 99% of users. Imposition is _hard_, especially to do right. One could argue that the time that would have to be spent implementing imposition support might be better spent addressing the redraw issues you mentioned, or making any number of other improvements. I stepped up and started working on some of the issues in Scribus that troubled me, and worked on adding some things I needed. What I've done has been rather limited so far, but I've done it. I would be delighted to see if I can help you get started planning and writing a simple imposition plug-in. I'm on IRC quite a bit, and of course on the mailing list, so feel free to drop me a line. -- Craig Ringer
