Posts Tagged ‘DTP’
A short Evaluation of Scribus 1.3.3.14
My software of choice for DTP is PagePlus. I’m a little behind, I have version X2. More importantly I’ve been using it for years, mainly for simple fliers.
We have a requirement for DTP at church and someone suggested Scribus. The free version of PagePlus is rather too limited, so I decided to take a look.
This evaluation has not stretched the product. It has though stretched me. The use interface is far from obvious. After inserting a frame, which is easy enough you then have to insert content. So after inserting an image frame, I have to right click and choose ‘Get Image …’ or press Ctrl-D.
After inserting a text frame I have to click the Icon before I can type in the frame. This is fundamentally time wasting, what else am I going to put in a text frame, apart from text.
To resize an image you must use properties on the frame, click the image section and select ‘scale to frame size’. Then when you adjust the frame the image size changes. If you don’t do this the exposed portion of the image changes.
I tried to paste an image, but that seems to be impossible. I tried to ‘drag-and-drop’ an image, both onto the page and into a frame. Although windows indicates that it is OK, nothing appears on the page or in the frame.
Some of the text properties seem to work in unison and some don’t, I’m still confused about that.
If we are looking to use this to produce the monthly magazine then there are some more serious limitations. I cannot find a ‘booklet’ option. This is certainly available in PagePlus and has been for years, and I’m pretty sure its in Publisher too. You have to pay for those of course.
In general it is responsive once started and the .PDFs that it produced are well compressed (74K for the first page as opposed to 208k with PagePlus for both pages). Stratup however is slow, a long time is spent creating the font cache.
