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On Sat, 30 Apr 2011, Neil Winchurst wrote:
Gordon Henderson wrote:I am no expert in Scribus but I saw this in a tutorial the other day. To make an image transparent you need it to be in the png format. Jpeg cannot do it. So the recommendation was that any images that you wish to use in Scribus should be in the png format in case you need transparency.It's not that Scribus (probably) can't do what she wants it to do, is more that what she wants isn't a full-blown DTP, it's just something to produce a page or 2 of mixed text and graphics - e.g. one thing she wanted to do recently was to make an image transparent to place on top of some text - she spent an hour trying to work out how to do this, and failled. If the solution is to export it into GIMP, then use some voodoo to make it transparent, then re-import it into Scribus, then it's a fail for her, as it's a simple couple of clicks in Publisher.
It's already failled at that point then.
And yes you do need the Gimp to prepare the images. But it is easy to link that to Scribus as you are working on a page.
Even I would find that unacceptable - these days. There are plenty of libraries to do just that - resize, make transparent, etc. so if Scribus can't do it natively and I'd have to use GIMP (or whatever), then it's a royal PITA.
I'm sure it can do these things, but I don't have the time right now to learn how it works, then teach my wife how to do it, and she's too impatient to read the manual or work through tutorials - especially as she's just been made redundant and has other things to worry about )-: She did a 2-page questionnaire for the family lunch today and it took her under 10 minutes to do it and print it out using Publisher (and this was by using the Citrix gateway to connect into work and print it out at home!) She tried to do a one-sheet test page a couple of days ago in Scribus and it took her nearly 2 hours.
So when people say they can save money by moving to OSS, then sure, I believe them - after they've paid for the re-training, etc. because Scribus does not appear to be a Publisher drop-in replacement, and when you have someone that's been using Publisher for the past 15 years struggling to learn something new, then there's going to be no end of resistance.
I'm almost sounding like a like MS here - I don't, but I'm really struggling to wonder why there isn't something in the *nix world that's as easy to use as Publisher.
I can not get my wife to use Linux. I failed with my Father-in-Law too (but he's 74, old dog, new tricks, etc.) so I'm giving up. Keep MS on the desktop, that's fine. I think I'll stick to Linux servers, etc. and suggest that my wife gets a brand new Win7 PC when she gets her redundancy settlement (and that'll be the time to buy Publisher too, as I'm sure, like most MS stuff appears, that transferring the license from her current XP box will be too hard or impossible)
If someone wants to give up a day of their time to teach my wife how to use Scribus (under XP), then they're more than welcome... However the purchase cost of Publisher is much less than a day of my time is worth!
Thanks for all the other comments. Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq