Note the orginal message did not get to the Scribus list. Posting is subscriber only.

Please see my comments in-line.

Message: 13 From: Jonathan Phillips <jon@...15...> To: inkscape inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 09:05:36 -0800 Subject: [Inkscape-devel] [Fwd: [Sodipodi-list] First sodipodi+scribus doc experience]

-----Forwarded Message----- From: Tarax <tarax.mdk@...118...> To: sodipodi-list@lists.sourceforge.net, scribus <scribus@...119...> Subject: [Sodipodi-list] First sodipodi+scribus doc experience Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:00:25 +0100

Hi yall,

First let me tell you that it is a REAL GREAT PLEASURE to use these two wonderfull softs together :-))) Using sodipodi (0.33) for a little while now, yesterday I created my first document with Scribus (1.1.4cvs, build id 29.11.03) importing svg drawings. Actually this was a business card to be laid down on paper by a professional printing company. At the end of the day I felt quite well with scribus and the PDF (with transparency) was validated by the "printer"... JOY ! ;-)

Nevertheless, I encountered few issues... First, importing in scribus from a sodipodi svg:

• path width and shape stroke is abnormaly fat, but reducing it to 0 then

resetting the proper thickness works well

• line breaks in text elements disapear in scribus and bitstream vera sans

bold italic becomes bitstream vera sans roman

Could be different naming convention of fonts.

Note, I find it much safer and consistent to export "plain" SVG from Inkscape or Sodiopodi. We have tested a significant part of the W3C SVG 1.1 test suite for import and rarely have problems - excepting unsupported features i.e. animation, scripting.

• it would be great to be able to open/create a new scribus document straight

from an svg one, thus setting automaticaly the document size (and in future evolutions with svg print support, multi pages documents...:-) size and proportion doesn't seem to be very stable (50x64mm object -> 71x84mm)

You should be able to open Scribus and then select Flie > Import > SVG Image and have it create a doc. I checked the current cvs and this does work as designed. Because the way measurements can be changed in Scribus, you still are probably safer creating a page and then importing SVG. If the importer, finds issues with the SVG file, it simply will do nothing.

"Cleaning" up the doc then exporting it back in svg with scribus and opening this last file in sodipodi:

• the path which hadrounded ends has now square ends. Resetting the proper

choice is ok.

Will look at this...

• 91x61mm doc with 2mm margins => 72.8x48.8mm svg doc in sodipodi
• texts are exported in one text element but, in it, a tspan is created for

each character, which is not very handy to work with then :-S

Finally, it would be great if guides could be kept from one soft to the other and back.

These are few things I have noticed... I'll certainly be more accurate in my comments as I'll experiment further...

Anyway, many thanks again

Tarax

PS: little OT, I have fonts available in sodipodi which aren't in scribus, could someone give me few advices about that problem ?

Which distro and which fonts? This has largely been fixed in Scribus 1.1.1 with a new font discovery mechanism.

At the moment, for getting really high quality PDF from SVG, SVG > Scribus > PDF can't be beat. Franz has put a ton of work into making the PDF exporter really robust and correct to the PDF specs. I test Scribus PDF's almost daily using professional PDF pre-flight tools, as well as a new Fiery RIP. Generally, I find if it RIPS, most printers should have no problems with Scribus PDF's. Right now, there is really nothing in open source which can generate the kind of 'press-ready" PDF like Scribus. Ghostscript 8.1+ has many improvements in pdfwrite, but its still in progress.

Mind you the SVG importer is quite new code, but it is quite functional and usable. There are also detailed notes on http://scribus.net in the documentation. When you have issues, please drop in on #scribus at freenode.net or post to the mailing list. All the devel team monitor these closely.

Cheers, Peter