[Journal] Volume 8 Rebellion

[Sunburned Surveyor]

Tyler,

Thanks for your responses. I agree Scribus has some limitations, and
it is certainly quite a different tool than LaTex.

I certainly didn't want to give the impression that Scribus was a
better tool for the journal than LaTex. It is just a tool that I am
more comfortable with. At the end of the day it comes  down to limits
on volunteer time, and on selecting priorities. I don't want to make
the investment in LaTex because I have other things to take care of.
That has been a frustration, because it does restrict how much help I
can be in the final production stages of the Journal.

I will accept my more limited role in the early stages of pulling
together a Journal volume, and will leave the post-production up to
others on the Journal team. This may slow our production cycle a bit,
but it seems like the best way forward.

We don't need to rehash the debate about Scribus again. I think you
feel pretty stongly about using LaTex and I can follow your lead. I
just need to limit my involvement in the final production
stages.Hopefully I can offset this by being more involved in the front
end of each volume.

I'm sure the other volunteers appreciate your leadership and support
of the Journal as much as I do.

Landon

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Tyler Mitchell
<tmitchell.osgeo at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Hi Landon,
>
> My two bits, others pipe up too, but I warn you that I'm probably more
> open to non-latex options than others here...
>
> Short answer: scribus won't help, don't waste your time.  What you did looks
> good but we can't switch to such a WYSIWYG "workflow".
>
> Long answer:
>
> It's an annual question brought up on this list and those interested can
> search the archives for previous debate.  I guess we need a wiki page to
> keep these arguments on so it's clear.  But Landon, you were even part of
> this question last year, so you already know the positions.
>
> I have gone from knowing nothing about latex to being able to do the entire
> workflow now (though bibliographies are haunting me a bit) - if I can learn
> it, than you can too and with your programming experience you can be even
> better than me, I'm sure!
>
> Scribus is (admittedly) not well suited for doing documents like our Journal
> length of 60+ pages.
> http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:FAQ#Books notes a few of the
> challenges which are deal-breakers for us, plus here are some of my concerns
> just to remind us of what we're dealing with:
>
> 1. Were you seriously proposing to manually place, edit and maintain 60+
> pages of text  (without footnotes or multi-level table of contents too) ?
>
> 2. Why lock up all the data in a binary format?  It makes it hard for
> distributed editing and version control, among other things.  It would be
> fine if it were a one man show that never needed any scripting.  But here we
> have different people managing different sections - it makes no sense.
>
> 3. Seems you have some ideas for improving our layout/style - that's worth a
> discussion on its own, let's hear it!
>
> 4. Having trouble converting to latex?  You know you can learn it, but
> perhaps learning it on a full blown volume of the journal is biting off a
> bit more than you can chew.  It's really not that hard one article at a
> time, and me and others are willing and able to pull together the master
> document.
>
> Last night I was able to compile all the proceedings articles in about 1.5
> hours, including importing some openoffice docs and hacking author
> contributed tex files.  I did all the compiling from the command line on a
> remote server and that was over a 50 page PDF (and I was experiencing a
> post-Christmas chocolate sugar crash!  Command "w2l -ultraclean input.odt"
> helped me a lot.)
>
> Did I hit bugs and problems?  Yes, but coming to others for help, I think,
> makes our journal team efforts stronger.  Whereas moving to a different
> platform, scribus in particular, makes us weaker.  We've built our own
> little knowledge base among our team and I'm grateful for that.  Sure, it
> slows us down to have to hunt down help - but what FOSS advocate doesn't
> like having to work with others? ;-)
>
> Though it may feel like it sometimes, our use of latex isn't some esoteric
> exercise.  It's an industry standard and meets our needs very well and I was
> one of the first to review various tool options and was convinced by others
> on the list to stick with (and learn) the latex way.  I haven't seen any
> benefit to move (except when I hit a particularly challenging bug and am
> short on time), so I don't support the idea to switch at all.
>
> Others are always welcome to continue the debate, but for me personally it
> is a non-starter and a waste of time.  I don't support switching, especially
> in the middle of a critical issue that needs to get out soon.  More on the
> status of vol 8 in another note.
>
> Tyler
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Sunburned Surveyor <sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com>
> Date: Monday, December 27, 2010 10:49 pm
> Subject: [Journal] Volume 8 Rebellion
> To: OSGeo Journal <newsletter at lists.osgeo.org>
>
>> Journal Team:
>>
>> I decided to foment a bit of a rebellion with Version 8 of the Journal
>> by putting together a Scribus file that can be used to layout the
>> journal articles for conversion to PDF. The scribus file uses open
>> font files, the OSGeo color scheme, and tries to hold to the
>> Volume 7
>> style as much as possible. (One small exception is that I
>> changed the
>> section and article titles to green instead of black.)
>>
>> The Scribus file uses master pages, linked text frames, paragraph
>> styles and autmatic page numbers to make page layout quick and simple.
>> I converted one of the peer review objects to PDF using this Scribus
>> file. Both the Scribus file and the PDF file created from it are
>> attached. I did this on my work computer, and Scribus is still a
>> little buggy on MS Windows, so there is a page numbering
>> problem. I'll
>> try producing the PDF on my Linux box to see if this fixes the
>> problem. I'm also going to look into using the Python scripting
>> functionality of Scribus to automatically generate the total page
>> numbers shown at the bottom of the page.
>>
>> I know most of you guys are hardcore LaTex fans, but I find LaTex
>> working with LaTex is like getting major dental work without a pain
>> killer. If we can use Scribus for Journal layout it eliminates my
>> dependence on everyone else for LaTex work. This means I can
>> take care
>> of the post production work on the Journal sooner, which will
>> speed up
>> our publication cycle. I know it is hard for people to make time for
>> the LaTex conversion, which isn't a short task, and I think things
>> will go smoother if I can start using an open source tool for post
>> production that I am familiar with.
>>
>> Take a look at the attached files and let me know what you
>> think. If
>> this is going to be acceptable to the group I can work on converting
>> the reminaing peer review articles for Volume 8 to PDF using Scribus.
>>
>> Landon
>>
>> PS - I'm also going to work on an epub template for the Journal
>> when I
>> get some time.
>>