Scribus and Slowness

There are a number of things that annoy me in the process of using Scribus (the only real opn source professional grade layout application) and while I enjoy using it (and all free software in general), I can understand why Scribus is not considered a first-tier app like Indesign or Quark.

I was laying out the final version of the Player's Guide yesterday and came up with a bit of frustration and a number of work flow destroying obstackes. Some of the problems are as follows:

1. Tables.

Tables in the current version I am using (1.4 rc6) still consider tables a set of grouped text boxes. Great idea, but entering data and formatting them is just painful! I had a chance to play with the Google Summer of Code 2011 project completed by Elvis Stansvik, and aside from of few segfaults (Non-geek translation: crashes), it seems a thousand times better. There is no indication on the Scribus Wiki as to the date it will be integrated into a 1.4 stable release, but I can't wait until it is, and fully ready for production use.

Until then, I am stuck with making my tables in LibreOffice, saving them as tiffs, opening them in GIMP and cropping them, then pasting them into Scribus as pictures. Talk about a Time-Sucking Abyss!

2. Story Editor

While the paradigm of destop publishing is seriously different from using a word processor (like Microsoft Word), I actually prefer the amount of control it gives over the document I am laying out. With that being said, the story editor tool in Scribus could still learn a thing of two from the word processing folks. Making changes in the story editor does not result in a change to the text in the editor window per se. In order to see how a section of the page is formatted, you have to look at the left side for the style type being used or move the cursor to a position where you can see the changes in the text by which settings have been toggled or selected in the top toolbar. Lame.

Because layout is such a graphic and spatial task, this old school editor (XEDIT or vi) way of doing things (non-geek translation: DOS or pre-Windows) makes it incredibly tedious to flow text and keep track of which styles you have used with a quick glance. Yes, if I had one of those fancy 24-inch wide monitors (like I should have but on which I can't rationalize spending 200 bucks when this is just a hobby) I could just keep updating in one window and watching the changes in the other, but should I really have to?

As a result of this annoying development, it it tedious as hell to lay things out. The Scribus wiki recommends doing the heavy lifting in LibreOffice, but should I have to? And if I have to, shouldn't Scribus have a tool that searches for all the formatting combinations upon import and list them as styles for easy access in Scribus so that if something needs to be tweaked, the styles are already built in?

This has arguably been the main reason why it has taken so long to write this book. I have done the heavy formatting in LibreOffice as the wiki suggests, but every port of content has of yet (I am still hoping one willn't) had niggles and little idiosyncrasies that has required post import tweaking.