Inkscape just keeps impressing me (Can't say the same for Scribus, unfortunately...)


Inkscape is rapidly turning into one of my favourite applications. Not only does it readily handle churning out standard page layouts and reading Cinemon's generated SVG, it does a very nice job of rendering out to images. I also use it for creating the templates for the generated SVG. The workflow is a little clunky, but it works.

Scribus, on the other hand, left me cold (and a few hours poorer). It can import SVG (though it messes up a lot of the Inkscape SVG I've got), but then can't wrap text around it. It lets you define styles, but doesn't let you link them to one another (so updating the root style can update all dependent styles). It has snapping-to-guidelines, but when turned on the snapping is absolute, everything snaps to a guideline, not just things that are close.

All those problems are actually things I could work around (and did). What made me give up on Scribus was printing... it's a page layout application... I'd expect this to be its greatest strength... instead it completely omitted the story text and did a remarkably poor job of rendering the images and graphics. The export to PDF was equally unusable. Sigh.

So, back to Inkscape to lay out the pages. Discover that you can drop paragraph text into any shape... requires a bit of manual work in the XML editor, but nothing insane. Doesn't handle resizing well, but other than that, a workable solution for doing single-page layouts.

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