On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 21:08 -0400, Gregory Pittman wrote: > The faults here lie not with Scribus so much as > illustrating the problems associated with proprietary, closed data > formats.
If you mean PDF, then (a) It's not closed, though it is proprietary, and (b) it being proprietary isn't the problem re editing. The problem is that what PDF is designed for is a final presentation format. It's not designed to be editable. It does its job *extremely* well, producing very accurate documents in many different viewers on many platforms, with few problems with fonts, etc etc. Part of how it manages this is by sacrificing editability. Lobbing Scribus documents around would suck for what PDF is needed for. We'd be back in the dark ages of the years when PageMaker then Quark were dominant, when you had to have a particular version of a particular program to open a file, and the sender had to collect up all the fonts and other resources. You'd then often have to convert some of the resources to your platform's format (eg fonts) before being able to work on the document, and *EVEN THEN* there was no absolute guarantee it would be the same. Stuff that; I'm keeping PDF :-) . It's been the biggest pain-saver in my work for a long time, even despite the problems the ancient software we use at work has with it. Accepting Quark documents was a nightmare I'm glad is over. Now, it would be nice to be able to edit PDF at some level or import text and images from it. It can be done, as tools like PitStop show, but it's evidently not at all easy to do it well or comfortably. That's a limitation of the format as much as anything, and one I think is well worth it for the benefits of the format when used for what it's designed for. > Because Scribus files are open and text-based, they allow > transparency of the contained information. That doesn't hurt, though the fact that the format is structured for continued editing - not a "final" document format - is probably more important. > A very important additional > advantage, much like the situation with tex/latex is that the files are > so small that the most efficient way of saving them will always be as an > .sla file, even in addition to the subsequent PDF. Probably not always when you consider font subsetting, images, etc. Still, frankly I don't think the file size even matters. (If I sound a little brisk, it's not intended, I'm just writing quickly and trying to be succinct.) -- Craig Ringer
