John, Thanks for the non-hostile comments. I want to call them useful but I don't think much is useful for my situation. But at least you had something to say. Honestly I haven't had any complaints with Vista up till now and I have been using it for about a year and a half. I use Mac and Windows XP at work because I have a whole range of apps where some of them are Windows only such as Adobe LiveCycle Designer and others the department supports on the Mac. And even at home I have some Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended and LiveCycle Designer which as far as I am aware are Window only apps so it isn't likely that I am going to dump it all just to get Linux. Although I wouldn't mind delving into it. I like to think I'm biased.
Admittedly I am just starting out with Scribus and have just played around with very small documents and as yet no "real" jobs. So I have a way to go before I am half way proficient at it. Scribus has only crashed once and so far all is not lost. The automatic backup in this case would I think be an excellent idea. I realize Scribus is a growing and developing app and I expect to see it improve. The open source bug has bitten me. And as to the advise on creating large books in smaller chunks I think that is well worth keeping in mind. So again thanks for some encouraging and helpful remarks. Steven Dayton -----Original Message----- I suspect the above was written tongue in cheek. It's not luck. Linux doesn't crash. Most of my Linux applications never crash. I typeset books using pdftex or more rarely Context flavors of TeX. I use the Vim editor. The nature of TeX is that it runs in read-only fashion. If it errors off then the original file is untouched. I have found from my limited use that Scribus 1.3.3.12 and later versions of 1.3.5 don't crash either. In my TeX work I am protected because Gvim keeps a continuous backup copy under another name as editing proceeds. Perhaps Scribus could adopt a similar automatic backup method. With respect to Windows the reported info is that it became more stable when XP was offered. Vista is too new to evaluate. Most users with XP experience hate Vista. I have a neighbor who hates Vista but won't go back to XP because Vista is "the latest thing". But many businesses refuse to upgrade to Vista from XP. My wife who has not used anything else loves Vista . Go figure. I have Win 2000 on a seldom-used partitition. Individual applications such as MSWord can crash if they are overloaded with too much data or functionality. I monitor many mailing lists and help moderate one. More than once I have seen a tear-stained e-mail where someone has lost their entire book with no backup whilst trying to create it with spellchecker, grammar checker, TOC and indexing all turned on simultaneously. And because it runs so slowly with a big book breaking the book up into idividual files is almost a routine practice. Scribus also has problems with very large documents and I suspect this is a function of the basic design. The Scribus Manual was broken into segments and developed that way or so I am told. But I am happy to use Scribus for those applications where it blows the competition away such as book covers. -- John Culleton Able Indexers and Typesetters http://wexfordpress.com
