On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 04:50:57PM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 04:41:08AM -0400, bulia byak wrote:
In a lot of respects, page and pageSet containers are similar to groups or layers.
[Ignoring underlying implementation details and focusing on UI as per earlier email...]
- Reuse the Layers dialog for displaying and switching these page
containers as well, making them part of the overall layers tree displayed in that dialog. In this way, each page may have its own subtree of layers, but there may be shared layers that show up on all pages, stored in master pages or in the content before the pageSet (which is also treated as a background master page). Of course the Layers dialog will have to treat such page-layers in a special way, namely:
It might be nice to have a way for the most common operations to be done entirely in-canvas rather than having to go to a dialog, so here's one rough idea...
Well, it is a rather special view: one would presumably still want to activate a menu item / button to switch to this multi-page view. Essentially, it is the same as a dialog box, bar some widget arrangement details.
Though I too tend to think that the interface shouldn't be so close to what we have for layers.
From an internal representation perspective, I believe we do want to maintain separate [logical] pages rather than having one big coordinate space, just so we can handle the off-page drawing element issue.
As you say, logical pages needn't be in a one-to-one relationship with physical pages. A spread or poster might be considered a single logical page, without considering the magazine/newspaper case where a single side of paper has two page numbers, or the book case where a single side of paper might be folded & cut into many many page numbers.
For some of these issues, we'd need to talk to Scribus people: these sort of page arrangement and editing issues are very important for many DTP users, and we might as well share the same interface. Accordingly, I won't comment on the suggestions for interface for page insertion/deletion, page to paper mapping etc.: such discussion belongs primarily in a Scribus forum, where the users have a lot of experience with these things, and where we'd presumably want to copy whatever is best for scribus for such tasks.
The inverse of this is the "labels and business cards" scenario, where you have multiple documents printed on a single page. (I ran into this just recently
For anyone else who runs into this, there's a command-line tool psnup ("postscript n-up") for this.
pjrm.