Hello I'm currently testing Scribus (1.3.3.4 under Fedora) to see whether we could use it for our research journals, as a possible replacement for our existing DTP software, 3B2. Maybe it's a bit unfair to compare Scribus with a very expensive piece of high-end software, but from what I've seen of Scribus, it's very impressive. I'm keen on using open-source software wherever possible, and I think Scribus is a definite possibility for the near future. I have a few queries and suggestions, mostly related to the text engine (some of these I think are on the roadmap, but I'll mention them anyway). Please forgive me if I've misunderstood anything.
One of Scribus's current weaknesses, from our perspective, is that there seems to be very little control over hyphenation. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way (except maybe by modifying the hypenation dictionary) of stopping two-letter breaks like "ex-ample", which we don't allow. I might be misunderstanding something here - is there any way of manually tweaking the hypenation at particular points in the text? For example, with our existing DTP system, if we insert a smart hyphen (called a 'discretionary hyphen' in 3B2) at the beginning or end of a word this stops it breaking. In general, a discretionary hyphen in 3B2 overrides the default hyphenation - can Scribus's smart hyphen behave similarly . There is also a way of creating a user-defined exception dictionary that overrides the built-in hyphenation dictionary. This would be very welcome in Scribus. Is there a way of going from a given point in a text frame to the story editor, with the cursor at the corresponding place in the story editor? At the moment it seem that the cursor is always positioned at the beginning of the text, and it then takes time to locate the correct point, especially in a document running to 10 or 20 pages. It would be great if the story editor cursor would position itself at the same point in the text as the text-frame cursor. Another suggestion for the story editor. It would be good if all the hidden structure (control codes, font changes, etc) of the text stream could be optionally revealed (a bit like the old Wordperfect 'reveal codes'). Also, it would be great if some sort of non-printable markup could somehow be embedded in the text, for example to indicate authors' first names and surnames (eg for later extraction by a script). I'm looking forward to version 1.3.9 for the LaTeX support! Many of our journals are heavily mathematical. At the moment we would have to limit our use of Scribus to non-mathematical articles, or maybe lightly mathematical articles, with equations imported as graphics. Is there any sort of time estimate for version 1.3.9? I know that the nature of open-source development makes this an unfair question, but I'm just trying to get a rough ball-park figure (eg <6 months, <1 year, <2 years) to help with my evaluation. I'll stop there - that's enough for a first posting! Many thanks, Jonathan
