Hi list, I am doing a holiday-hobby project for an anniversary on Thursday-night:
Some simple animated ants carrying stuff, and a proverb. I designed my ants in Inkscape and had prepared and tested a script for Scribus (with dummy ants) for moving them. Now I am stuck with a "trivial" problem: My "stage" is my page, custom size 100 x 100 mm My ants will walk through the stage in an endless procession. Therefore I created 20 different ants and grouped them, the group is 800 mm wide. I will move this group - by script - across my page in small steps, and export a bitmap with each step. This has worked with dummy boxes before. (GIMP will convert this into an animated .gif with two simple commands.) What is my problem? I cannot see my ants! Scribus lets me move only so much to the left or right of my page. Even though I have this long group of ants (selected). This has got something to do with the "scratch space" maybe? I searched help and I googled and found several scratch space related bugs (are ants bugs?). I tried increasing my scratch space - and it stopped at a funny maximum of 352,778 mm on either side. So I cannot see, what I have got at x: -500 mm. But I need to work with all those moving legs for my ants (check them visually) and place the props (food items) which they will carry in my animation. Even funnier: When I first imported my SVG objects, I could go all the way to the left, I was preparing groups of legs as far as -2400 mm and could see them. Now after lunch break, having re-opened my document, it feels locked somehow to the page and small surroundings. So: - What exactly (technically) speaking is this scratch space? - Is the scratch space really the reason, why I cannot scroll further left? Or zoom further out? - Are there work-arounds please? (Yes, I need to install Blender and buy expensive books and take weeks of tutorials and learn the craft of animation... But this will not happen before Thursday-midnight) I just want to move some objects from left to right across my Scribus-page; is there hope or do I need to bury this idea? - Are there external or historical reasons, why Scribus is limited space-wise? Is the PDF format (preferred export) limited? I just tried making a huge page and stopped at 1000 x 1000 meters (not mm), no problems for the actual pages. I can see the need for huge pages, because in the port of Hamburg I have seen printed banners of several hundred meters width. - But then why so limit the working space around the page? Even while writing this, I can imagine several other reasons, why users might want to prepare or test or temporarily store stuff just off the visible page. Maybe if there has to be a scratch space for technical reasons, it could be limited to a multiple to the page-dimensions, not to an absolute limit of only 350 mm? - Now, since I am working with vectors: Would it help, if I scaled down all my objects over all four layers to a fraction of their size and also scaled down the page? Is there a safe way to select "everything" and reduce the sizes without loosing the relative positions? I tried it and learned this: - When selecting many objects and re-scaling they all get moved to some top-leftest position, bah. - When clicking select-all, only objects on the page get selected (not a complaint, just an observation) - When I select and group and then re-scale, things stay properly positioned towards each other. (Funny enough, while moving my mini-ants back towards my page I made a comma-typing-error and could go and see as far left as -74000 mm (like before my lunch break). - So having created a mini-stage seems my work-around for the moment. The panic is gone, I will be rather busy until Thursday night, with my first humble stop-motion animation. Your input, answers and observations regarding the scratch-space and the display-area and your personal work-flow regarding larger objects (which maybe bleed over several pages or whatever) are welcome. This is not a complaint, I just got rather nervous, when I was entirely blocked half an hour ago. Martin -- ZASKE Martin responsable G?G? BP 50 - Bassila - B?nin tel G?G? 66.66.11.11 tel pers 97.44.62.95
