Lament: Even abandoned for years, Ventura is better than Scribus today

Let me be clear, I am not trying to start a fight pro/con any other software.  But I recently tried to use Scribus (v1.5.4) to do a modest length (19 page) document with two levels of headings, where most of the 2nd level sections had an associated image frame.  And I hated the experience.  I had to create separate text frames for every heading, individually set attributes on each one so they would appear in a table of contents, and manually shift frames throughout the entire document every time the text was edited, which meant more splitting or merging of frames as they crossed page boundaries (and resetting of attributes in most cases).  And every time the TOC was regenerated, I had to go in and manually reapply all the TOC paragraph styles.

There are still things about "long" (even 2-page!) documents that Ventura does effortlessly that are long, manual, repetitive slogs in other layout programs.  At the moment, Scribus doesn't even have the concept of anchoring something relative to the text flow.  The interaction of anchors and layout, especially with overlaid frames set to exclude text, is quite difficult, so I'm very sympathetic to some glitches here and there.  But the closest Scribus comes to anchors is with footnotes/endnotes (which are prone to crash it).  There's absolutely nothing like anchoring images frames to the associated text paragraph, much less anchoring caption frame(s) to one of those image frames.

Frankly, the mental model for working with Scribus is "complete all text edits entirely, prepare all images, then lay out the document once."  This is the philosophy, given in writing, by several of its development team.  That's just not practical.  I cannot think of any 20-50 page chapter that I've had anything to do with that did not get at least 5-10% paragraph edits after the first laid out proof was ready, despite all pleas to authors and editors to get changes made earlier.

This particular release of Scribus has other unwelcome failings, like replicating the text flow through a bunch of linked frames 10 to 20 times sequentially.  (I have not yet sorted out the trigger for this, but it's probably related to unlinking and relinking text frames).  That, at least, is easy to detect and fix, because the replicas all get tacked on the end of the text flow, rather than scrambled into the middle somewhere.

Sadly, I will not be able to eke out much more life from my install of Ventura.  V10 on Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit, has quite a few display bugs.  The old "disappearing text" problem from V8 runs wild in V10 on 64-bit.

So, I'd appreciate hearing what layout tools you have moved to from Ventura, and your experiences with the transition.  And join me in a lament for a lost great software. 

  • You are completely correct re Scribus. I'm amazed that people still contribute to the project.

    I have many old .vp documents I am still converting to newer software. Mostly electronic instrument manuals of projects that were once abandoned themselves that the respective companies are resurrecting. As they say, old things have become new. For this I have been using ver.10 on Windows 10. Other than needing to be careful about fonts, I haven't had issues per se. No more than I ever did. I started with Ventura when it ran on a GEM environment. I still love the thing and, to this day, dislike that Corel killed it. 

    Like you, I can see the day Windows will leave it behind. Which is why I just built a new box running XP Pro. I don't want to be left high and dry. But I won't ever be building new publications with it. It's a means to an end.

    Since 1989, I have run VP, PM, QXP and once available, ID...but I also use Viva Designer Pro for a couple of German & Swiss clients. So I am rather software agnostic despite having my own preferences. For one company I have moved their publications I once designed and wrote to QXP, others in ID. They both have advantages, but I prefer QXP. And then there's the whole perpetual license thing. I can get away with still using ID CS6 for most ID work, but do rent for a month or so a year for clients that want ID CC files in return. QXP is perpetual license.

    I do a lot of novel-type of books and use QXP near exclusively for them. I use tagged text in both QXP & ID. QXP's tagged text is similar to Ventura's, so porting text over means a series of PERL RegExs in a good text editor (I use UltraEdit) to run through and alter tagging from VP files.

    But if you are looking for something that is 1:1 with VP? Ain't gonna happen. My main pet peeves have to do with the simplest things (truly integrated image captions) to the ability of having space above at the top of a text frame if desired to the paragraphs that one can have side by side (I like to call them table-less tables).

    So I have had to rethink some design decisions from back in the day. In some cases just resolving "how do I do this that was so easy in VP" type of things.

    For you, moving forward away from VP, I can only recommend downloading trials of any layout software. Get them to extend trials if possible. Let them know what you are doing. I forget how long Adobe's ID trial is. It is short if I recall so you may need to rent a month after it runs out. Q's trial is a mere 10 days, which they will extend to 30 days upon request.

    Trial length is the least of the issues when transitioning. I find for companies I have trained in the transition from ID, VP or Q is the mindset. Kinda like the Pogo cartoon strip: We have met the enemy and he is us. Meaning the hardest part is setting aside the "right & wrong" of the new software in comparison to the former software. Making on-the-fly comparisons are inevitable. But the more one can see the newer software as a challenge to be met and overcome the smoother the transition is.

    Good luck.

    Mike

  • I used to work for a multi-national technical publisher running Ventura under GEM then Windows. Some say they still run it under Windows 10with a copy of mfs42.dll in the programs folder and in XP compatibility mode. Damn fine software.