Open Office Woes/Scribus Joy

[Kat Kanning]

Not yet.  I was having internet problems, too.

[Dan]

Those are the most frustrating, because you know all the help you could ask for is "on the other side" of that internet connection.

[Kat Kanning]

Yeah   watching the videos now.

[Kat Kanning]

Almost done with the Nov. issue of the paper using Scribus for the first time.  I like it!  There have been a few bugs, but I've been able to work around them.  It's so nice to put things where I want them and have them stay there!  I like being able to type in locations exactly, too.

Thanks so much Dan!!! 

[Dan]

When you get 30 minutes, could you brain dump your thoughts, gotcha's, learning curve experience?

[Kat Kanning]

Once I went through the tutorials, it was fairly straightforward.  It didn't turn out to be a big learning curve (I was having more problems with the Gimp, but that was more lack of knowledge about graphics than the program).  There wasn't a time when I was just sitting there frustrated because I couldn't figure out how something worked or a workaround for something I wanted to do.

There were a couple of bugs I ran into - wrong style being displayed, and images jumping back and forth between normal size and "scaled to frame size", but these were minor and could be worked around.  I couldn't figure out how to turn off "scaled to frame size" on an image without just deleting the image and starting over, which really wasn't a big problem. The dropdown menu for "Edit Style" or selecting a style name kept disappearing, so I'd either have to restart the program or guess where the menu was to click on it.  I wanted to know what "Automatic Text Frames" with columns/gap in the New Document dialog was, but couldn't find an answer to that.  I wanted columns in the document, but wound up using guides and making sure all the text boxes sat on the guides.  It took me a while to figure out how to put a box around a textbox and how to put some space between the text and the edge of the box.  I went through the instructions several times and never did figure out automatic page numbering.  Maybe it doesn't work on my computer?  Maybe I just didn't get it?  On the pdf creation dialog, I wasn't sure about the Color setting - I wanted it greyscale and for a printer, so I just picked greyscale.

The preflight verifier was so helpful!  That alone makes the program infinitely better than what I was using.  It found a couple of textboxes where the text was cut off and some images that didn't have high enough resolution.

Features I used mostly:  text frames, story editor, style editor, had the properties window open all the time, Link Text Frames.  Used a little:  Line, measure tool, zoom, preflight verifier, save as pdf

So there was a lot there that I haven't tried or don't know exactly what it does.

I put a draft up:
http://keenefreepress.com/KFP110107.pdf

Sounds like I didn't like it from all that, but I did.  It was way less frustrating to get what I wanted done in this program than in Word.  Next time I do it, it should be way easier, since I won't be setting up the document from scratch.

Did you work on this program?  Curious why you wanted to know gotchas, etc.  Was this the kind of info you were looking for?

[error]

I put a draft up:
http://keenefreepress.com/kfp110107.pdf

Looks nice. But it seems like there's less space between the columns. (I forget what exactly this is called.) Maybe it's just the way the PDF is rendering on screen and it'll look fine in print. I don't know.

(Oh, BTW, Adobe FINALLY put out Acrobat Reader 8 for Linux. Took 'em long enough.)

[Kat Kanning]

Yeah, I was thinking it was too crowded between the columns.  Redoing it for this issue would mean basically starting over though.

[Dan]

No Kat.  But sometimes the single most useful thing a new user can do for the fine folks that do write code, is to provide first-use real-world experience.

I was interested if you found the screencast tutorials useful?  It's becoming trendy and super easy to put up a video demonstrating how to use a piece of software, and the scribus team did a bit of that.

Do you mind if I pass along your thoughts to the scribus team?

[Kat Kanning]

Yes, the tutorials were useful for getting me started.  I went back and watched parts a second time when I actually got down to working on the document.

The other thing that was a bit strange was that the spacing between lines didn't automatically change with the font size, so if you use a big font, the letter wind up on top of the line above.

Sure you can send my comments on.  Thanks again for pointing out the program to me!

[Dan]

Scribus-ng came to my attention when Ubuntu (my linux distro) started a newspaper:
  http://fullcirclemagazine.org/?page_id=20

It started by volunteers that wanted to learn desktop publishing with open source tools.  Each issue has a section of Scribus lessons learned.

The video tutorials sealed it, though. 

BTW: I can't find were to automatically resize the gutter between columns either.  Seems it has to be done by hand.  *blech*

[Kat Kanning]

I didnt really even have columns, just set up some guides.