Miscellaneous Questions

• Why is Scribus built with Qt and not some other toolkit?
• Where does the name "Scribus" derive from ?
• Why are there no import filters for Quark, Indesign or other commerical DTP applications?
• So, how can I work with others who might have other DTP applications?
• Will there be a windows version of Scribus?
• Why does Scribus not remember the window positions when I close the application?

Answers

• Why is Scribus built with Qt and not some other toolkit?

  When Franz Schmid launched the project, it was originally written in Python, but for performance reasons he decided to port it to C++. The toolkit with the most complete documentation at the time was Qt 2.2. The first Qt 2 release was 0.3 in 2001. Scribus was ported to Qt 3, after Scribus 0.6 was released.

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• Where does the name "Scribus" derive from ?

  When Franz Schmid launched the project, the first working name was "Open Page", but thought to be too generic. Scribus derives from the latin name of the official writers in Roman times, from which we get scribe or writer. This translates well in to many languages besides English. The German word is schrift, for example.

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• Why are there no import filters for Quark, Indesign or other commerical DTP applications?

  There are several reasons why there are no import filters for commercial DTP applications.

  1. DTP file formats are very complex internally - problably the most complex on a PC. Creating import/export filters is a task far more complex than importing a spreadsheet or simpler word processing file formats. An engineer familiar with the internal file format of Pagemaker compared it to a 2m x 3m flow chart diagram with 6 point type. It was not until the arrival of Indesign 2.0 that reliable Pagemaker file import was possible in another DTP application, even though Adobe had the file format specs. Note: Not even Indesign CS can save to Indesign 2.0 format.
  2. The file formats are sometimes protected by patents and are not documented publically.
  3. So, is it unethical/illegal to apply hexedit to an InDesign file to reverse engineer the file format with hexedit or others for the purpose of creating the export/import plugins for Scribus?
     Possibly not, but given its a closed format we would expect to receive a warning from Adobe, as we did from Quark when there was a Quark importer in testing. We do not have the legal resources to challenge large proprietary software companies. Only one developer has been sucessful at reverse engineering Quark's software and it took a long legal case to succeed.
  4. Developer constraints. It is the considered judgement of the development team that efforts to improve Scribus is a more valuable use of time.
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• So, how can I work with others who might have other DTP applications?

  Use EPS, SVG or PDF as an exchange format. Scribus created PDFs can be easily imported into a number of commerical applications. SVG import is excellent for vector artwork. Scribus can import EPS files as long as they are conformant to the specs - this includes spot colors in DCS 2.0 files. The documentation has detailed notes covering these subjects.

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• Will there be a windows version of Scribus ?

  A native Win32 port was underway by one of the Scribus developers but this has been put on hold for the moment. There is no targeted date for completion.

  It is possible, but not really easy to build Scribus with Cygwin and the KDE-Cygwin packages from source, but there are still issues to solve.

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• Why does Scribus not remember the window positions when I close the application?

  Scribus does remember them and will attempt to put them back in the correct place, but depending on the window manager, or on various Qt bugs, it may not work. Eg, it works on Qt 3.1.x, but not on all versions of Qt 3.2.x and Qt 3.3.x

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