Graphicslab's blog

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Grafiklabor 04.11: Scribus 1.4 und, dann, wie weiter?

By a.l.e on 2011-04-08 18:45
[Grafiklabor, Scribus]

Sehr bald wird Scribus 1.4 veröffentlicht: bestimmt einen grossen Schritt für die freie Grafik!

Am Sonntag den 10. April 2011 werden wir den neuen Scribus sehen, downloaden und prüfen was er kann!

Das ist aber nicht alles: die Entwicklung von Scribus hat im letzten Jahr grosse Fortschritte gemacht, viele neue Features sind bereits in der Testversion programmiert und es gibt gute Chance, dass im 2012 bereits Scribus 1.6 erscheint. Ich werde die wichtigste Neuigkeiten und Pläne vorstellen und ihr werdet die Testversion vor Ort ausprobieren können!

Bis am Sonntag um 14 Uhr im Dock 18!

Getting rid of that brown frame

By a.l.e on 2011-03-24 09:00
[Scribus]

For a long time, Scribus has had an annoying bug which nobody understood how it could happen:

After changing the language of the GUI, a rather disgusting brown was added to the list of the colors, was automatically used instead of the transparency and the only way to get rid of it was to delete all the preferences!

Finally, Craig sorted it out and the fix will make it into the upcoming Scribus 1.4 RC3!

Grafiklabor 02.11: Freie Grafik und freie Schriftarten

By a.l.e on 2011-03-03 10:30
[Grafiklabor]

Das Grafiklabor vom 5. März 2011 widmet sich dem Umgang mit Schriftarten.

Wo kann man freie Schriftarten finden?
Welche ist die richtige Schriftart für dich?
Wo sind die freien Tools um Schriftarten zu verwalten?
Wie gehen Gimp, Inskcape und Scribus mit Schriften um? Und wenn ich sie verändern will? Kann ich meine eigene Schriftart entwerfen?

Dafür werden wir ein Blick in die Open Font Library, Font Squirrel , The League of Moveable Type, Fontmatrix, Fontforge, Inkscape und Scribus

Text undo for Scribus

By a.l.e on 2011-02-10 20:00
[Scribus, Scribus14]

Our grand parents used to cultivate the art of patient writing, caring about calligraphy, rich vocabulary and correct grammar. If they weren't happy with the result, they started over. Time have changed and the developers are adapting Scribus to the modern times: Editing in text frames is fast enough for most normally skilled typists and -- it's today's breaking news -- you can even undo your text editing without risking to lose your work!

Kidding aside. Scribus has slowly grown during the last 10 years and many features have been added. During the development of the 1.3.x series, an undo system has been introduced and -- one after the other -- more and more actions have been been added to the actions manager. One major piece was missing: the undo of text editing and formatting!

At the beginning of December, Cezary uploaded the first version of his patch and now -- after going through three revisions -- the patch has been added to 1.4svn... just in time to be included in the first release candidate for 1.4, which has been promised for the next weekend!

We congratulate Cezary on his first big patch for Scribus and are very pleased for this big improvement in Scribus usability.

Now, we can confidently look forward the release of Scribus 1.4!

Debugging Scribus

By a.l.e on 2011-02-10 06:00 PM
[Scribus]

While working with Scribus, you may run into bugs and you may be tempted to write bug reports and get them fixed by the Scribus developers. If you have limited debugging experiences you probably will be surprised, how easy it is, to produce a backtrace which will help the programmers to easily fix "your" bug. If Scribus does not work correctly but does not crash, it is a bit harder to collect the information but after having read this article, you will have a rough idea how a debugger works.

The first thing you will need is the Scribus source code. By reading the Scribus wiki you can find out how to compile Scribus on Linux.

It's pretty straightforward and we can summarize it in a few commands you will have to type in your terminal:

It may not look very friendly to you, but you have to admit that it's pretty compact (if it's the first you compile Scribus, you may have also have to install quite a few dependencies, if it's the first time you compile Scribus... but this is not the topic of today's post).

Now, we are ready to debug the Scribus code: getting a backtrace, setting a break point and inspecting the state of variables while Scribus is running

If you are experiencing a crash and want to post a full backtrace to the Scribus' bug tracker gdb (the GNU Deugger) is probably enough:

$ gdb ~/bin/scribus/bin/scribus
(gdb) run
... working in scribus and waiting for scribus to crash...
(gdb) bt
... full backtracking informations you will post to the bug tracker
(gdb) exit
$

But i don't think that you will want to go through the gdb man pages and its cryptic commands in order to set a break point and then have a look at the state of the variables.

There is a more friendly alternative: Scribus being based on QT, you can try out the IDE provided by the QT project: "QT Creator".

After having installed "QT Creator" (in debian the package is called qtcreator...) you can start it and import the Scribus project:

• File > Open File or Project.
• Browse to the directory where you have stored the Scribus source code (in our example above /home/yourusername/src/scribus/).
• Open the CMakeList.txt file.
• The "CMake Wizard" will ask you for a build directory: you should use the same build/ directory we have defined above (you just have to remove "qtcreator" from the location QT Creator is suggesting you).
• In the next step, QT Creator will ask your for the command line arguments to pass to cmake; the following string is probably a good default:
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/yourusername/bin/scribus -DWANT_DEBUG=1 -DWANT_NOOSG=1 ..
• Click on the "Run CMake" button and watch the output scrolling. If you have already compiled scribus before, there should be no error and you can finally click on the "Finish" button at the bottom of the dialog.

Now, you can browse through Scribus source files (if you don't see the pane in the screenshot below, you have to click on the "Show sidebar" button in the bottom toolbar):

You can open the files and read their content. Once you have found a place you want to test, you can set a breakpoint by clicking on the gray area left of the line number...

and then click on the "Debug" button in the bottom left corner:

Once Scribus will have reached the breakpoint it will stop and you will be able to check the state of the memory:

The buttons in the "Output pane" let you continue the execution of scribus, stop it, or run it step by step.

And if you have further questions, you're welcome to join our IRC channel (#scribus@irc.freenode.net) or our Mailing list

Comments

By cezaryece, on June 11, 2012, at 14:44

In my successful QtCreator settings I have:
Dir "GIT/scribus" with cloned repo (Scribus is in it) and BUILD and INSTALL dirs in it.
In QtQcreator Projects tab:
Build dir: ~/GIT/scribus/BUILD
in Build Settings:
Build steps
1. Custom Process
Step: - command: cmake
- working di: ~/GIT/scribus/BUILD
- command arguments: ../Scribus -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=../INSTALL -DWANT_DEBUG=1 -DWANT_GRAPHICSMAGICK=1
2. make

In Run Settings
- Deployment Custom Process Step: make with "install" argument and working dir as ~/GIT/scribus/BUILD
In Run as working dir also ~/GIT/scribus/BUILD.

As you can see the key is set of working dir everywhere (in my case ~/GIT/scribus/BUILD).

Export all text

By a.l.e on 2011-01-15 11:07 AM
[Scribus, Scripter]

Peter just added Greg's Export all text script to the repository of the official Scribus scripts: this means that the script will be distributed with the Scribus code and you won't have to look for it in the Wiki anymore.

This is very good news since it's a function many people keep asking for in the Scribus IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/scribus|) and on the mailing list.

But there is another reason why, this script deserves to to be more popular: It teaches the basics to everybody wanting to automate specific editing and formatting task in a Scribus document.

Two snippets are particularly interesting. The first one shows how to go through each page of the document and get each item out of it:

span style="color: #808080; font-style: italic;"># do something
    page += 1

The second snippet illustrates how to discriminate among different types of frame and how to get the content from text and image frames:

span style="color: #483d8b;">'Duplication, perhaps linked-to frame'

By the way, the numbers behind each type seem no to be well documented and are hidden in scribus/pageitem.h... here they are:

 


Finally a short example showing how useful this script can be: last week, Jim came to the , asked how he could add legends to each picture in his document, was told to look at the "export all" script and tweak it. He probably shook his head, but despite having no experience in programming he tried it out. With the help of the folks in the IRC channel and by reading the Scripter API documentation, he came up with a Script that he will soon be sharing in the Scribus Wiki (currently, his biggest concern is which license to choose...)

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