? (At) 11:14 -0500 09/01/04, Bob White ?crivait (wrote) :
>With reference to spell checking, I'm doing a document that has a text
>box for a heading, a small box with "normal" text, a couple of pictures,
>captions in a text box for the picture, another header, etc.
>
>In other words, there are 6 or 8 text boxes per page.  Importing text
>only imports one box at a time, so using another application for spell
>checking is severely painful.  I could get by if there was an export
>of the whole document to a text file.  Then I could run a spell check
>elsewhere and manually transport the corrections back, but a spell
>checker would be ideal.

This is a very interesting discussion. Let me share my working experience : DTP 
with Quark for over 15 years now (and so many white hair!).

On the production side, what you want is THE definitive text (which, obviously, 
is wishful thinking but anyway!). In our view, the spellchecking and text 
editing must be done upstream. Then, the text arrives in our caring hands for a 
shape-up, along with the pics and logos and so on. What one would expect, at 
that stage of the work, is a normal proof-reading that would lead to identify 
small corrections, typos, etc. Nothing that will bother too much the layout. 
All this to say, when in production - and I mean "production" where you have to 
deal with hundreds of pages everyday - there is not much room (time) for 
spellchecking by that same worker. This is done, usually, by another team of 
specialized workers, the proofreaders, whose job is not to identify some typos 
but to identify the typos!

HOWEVER!!!! ...

On the other side of production, some people (and there may be lots of people!) 
are going to edit the text and organize the layout in "one" single step (in 
some way).

QuarkXPress is not a renowned program for its spellchecking capabilities. Over 
the years, other vendors have come up with mature solutions. Some are connected 
to Quark (through XTensions) some are confined to the word processor...

It is a matter of how you see this work. From my point of view, I wouldn't ask 
for a spellchecker in Scribus. But if there was one, I think it would be useful 
anyway, to a fair percentage of the users, maybe more on the "bureautic" side 
of the editing planet!

Does that sound fair enough!?

By the way, I missed a few ones on yesterday's wishes (but it might be there 
already) :
- tracking/kerning (so useful)
- horizontal scaling of fonts

Also : if there is to be such thing as bullet/numbering function, please let us 
control the settings! We like much more using tabs and positive/negative 
numbers to set properly any kind of hierarchical information (than the 
automated and so hard to cope with automated settings that are in some word 
processors...).

Good day to all!

Louis Desjardins

>
>This is the first document I've done with Scribus, so I'm still
>learning.  Maybe there is a better way to format the document.  I will
>say that Scribus is the best program I've ever used to get the layout
>the way I want it.  I started this document in StarOffice. Initally,
>everything goes much faster, then the automatic stuff starts getting to
>you.  Pretty soon, there is a jumble of stuff that is impossible to sort
>out.
>
>Keep up the good work, and I vote for a spellchecker.
>
>Bob White
>
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