User-Developer Interaction

Introduction

From a Scribus meeting at LGM 2012 has come an idea to promote interactions between experienced users and the developers, in order to facilitate various operations these users commonly do with Scribus. This will also benefit casual users, of course.

Some initial discussions centered around more ease with bringing various objects, such as images, shapes, vector graphics, and even text. There is some limited ability to simply drag an image (from a file manager outside of Scribus) onto a document page, and have a frame automatically created for it. This may not (yet) cover all image file formats. There is also an ability to drag SVGs from a file management app as well. One can also right-click on the page, select Paste File from the context menu, which brings up a dialog for pasting a vector file on the page. With text files, you can only drag to an empty text frame, only plain text will appear, in other words, it's not suitable for ODT or even DOC files, since the various tags in the file are not stripped.

Another work in progress is the ability to export directly from Scribus to ePub format. There is a plugin in the works, not yet ready to incorporate into svn.

Finally, the Properties palette is undergoing some major changes in 1.5.0svn, and these initial efforts should be soon available in svn updates. This is not completely redesigned, so there will be a need for more interaction between users and developers to help guide the process.

How the Wiki will be used

An advantage of the wiki is to allow for some extended feedback and opinions about current and future changes. This is not to replace feature requests, which should still take place as usual. There can be links to RFEs, and other material, and also uploading of any pertinent images.

Since the wiki is passive, there will need to be some effort from those who make additions and comments to make these known. There may be some ability to utilize some other means, but manually sending a notification to the scribus and scribus-dev mailing lists might also be done. Some further organization can come from having a new wiki page for each topic.

Although typically we haven't used it much, we may want to encourage some feedback in the Discussion tab of the page for things which are just simple comments.