Scribus - Open Source Desktop Publishing

Ok, so here are some quirks I have found, working in ver 1.3.8 on Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit.

Undo does not work well at all - it does not undo any text changes. For example if you move an object then go on to do text editing, realise you made an error and hit the undo key to undo your changes expecting to return to a previous state you will be surprised, especially if you hit undo several more times thinking you must not have hit it the first time. What will have happened is that your text changes will not be undone but any object moving or formatting done previously will be undone - this is particularly problematic if you are editing text on a page other than you had been manipulating objects on. You will hit undo several times, undoing previous work without knowing you are changing your document. It seems that the seeming erratic undo behaviour is known by the developers and is commented about on their wiki site.

Selecting text using the mouse is difficult - click and drag from the beginning of a text block to the end of a paragraph and note how difficult it is to pick up the last character, but only sometimes. Try doing it in reverse, move your mouse out past the final character of the paragraph and drag backwards to select text - note that the final character is not selected. Try as hard as you might you simply will not select that final character, you will select everything except. But there is a way! You may need to zoom in on your text to do this but... instead of trying to start your selection well to the right (left-to-right system), to ensure you really do pick up the final character, think again - move your mouse as close as possible just to the right of the character and begin your selection - Voila! you will collect that final character and whatever else you drag over.

rotating text blocks yeilds weird behaviour - Now, this could be a problem with the font rather than Scribus but try this: create a text frame insert a few lines of text. Change the font to Garamond, bold the first few characters of the first line. Rotate the text frame 180 degrees. See how the characters which are bolded remain on the first line but everything else moves to a new line. Nothing you can do will move the following text back up to the first line until you unbold the first character in the first line. Using Arial font does not deliver this behaviour. Also selections is problematic with rotated text frames - the mouse simply does not seem to work at all for text within the frame.

These are just some of the quirks I have noted, the program is still usable but users will get frustrated.