As I've mentioned before, I use Scribus to publish my contributions to an APA. (Amateur Publishing Association) I do my composition in Libre Office then import the text to Scribus, apply styles and do whatever other formatting seems needed. In general, this works well.
In the disty that came out on Dec 6, one of the other contributors franked a comic strip called "Dry Bones" that had one of the characters talking about Channukah. The word was spelled differently in each panel and the point was that although Jews all celebrate it, we can't agree on how to spell it. In the next week's disty, I commented to him that the correct spelling was ????? This worked Just Fine in Libre Office, and I hope that all of you are seeing it the way I do. (The word should be in Hebrew script.) It imported OK into Scribus until I applied the styles. Alas, in Print Preview, it didn't show up because the font I was using didn't have the glyphs. Even after finding the right font (Tahoma) it didn't show up right because Scribus reversed the order of the characters. Just in case some of you don't know, Hebrew is written right to left. When I copied the characters into Libre Office, they were in the right order and stayed that way. Scribus, however, assumed that I'd entered them one at a time and reversed them. The only way I could force Scribus to display them the way they needed to be was to use the Character Generator to set up the string in reverse order and paste that in. Then, Scribus reversed them into what I needed. Now, I can understand doing that if (and ONLY if) I were entering the string into the Story Editor. Imagine, however, if I were to compose a long passage in Hebrew and import it. There should be some way to tell Scribus not to reverse such text as it's imported or, at the very least, it should ask before making the change. If it helps, I'm using Fedora 16 Linux with whatever version Fedora supplies, although I'm fairly sure it's the current stable version. Before reporting this officially, I'd like to see what other users think: is this a bug, a mis-feature or simply something that I could have prevented with a setting I'm unaware of?
