Story editor (Project)

=early draft=

=user contributed use cases= john jason: Adobe initially targeted InDesign at QuarkXPress users. QuarkXPress never had a story editor, so version 1.0 of InDesign came with no story editor. Eventually Adobe learned that lack of a story editor was costing them sales of InDesign to PageMaker users, as PageMaker had always had a story editor. Finally, in InDesign CS (or maybe it was 2.0) Adobe added a story editor to InDesign.

Prior to going to InDesign I had used both PageMaker and QuarkXPress. I never much missed the story editor in InDesign, but when it finally appeared I found it occasionally useful. Suppose you have a story threaded through 20 frames on 20 pages. To edit the entire story in canvas view means you have to select a frame, do your editing, move down a page, select a frame, do your editing, and on and on. If you have a story editor you can edit the entire story all at once in one window.

But to be efficient, the story editor needs to have all the features that are available in canvas view. That means the fonts have to appear the same - no more generic font for the story editor. And if you insert a glyph that does not exist in the font, no more faking it in the story editor.

I use 1.3.9 and I still use the story editor a lot. I don't have a lot of long stories, but I do have long documents. Editing in canvas view is frequently painfully slow. But when the long document slowness is finally fixed I can do without the story editor quite easily. I'd rather we spent our development efforts on something more critical.

a.l.e the story editor must be rewritten from scratch. it has been created at a time when scribus was very young and and in frame editing was not practical. it's built on the idea that it allows you to type text. today, you can easily import text from other apps (oo.org, ...) and in frame writing is not as painful anymore. on top of it, lot of new features have been added (like a more natural bold formatting, character styles, ...) and it's hard to add them into the story editor. so, the idea would be to let "normal" people switch to inframe editing and create a story editor for advanced users. it's really sad to see how many people read old manuals of scribus which suggest to use the story editor and -- that way -- never get in touch with all the scribus goodies. my dream is to have a story editor which can be launced as an external app and can so be used as tool for proofreading or collaboration.