I did not try Sumatra for long but if I'm not mistaken, the experience reminded me of Evince minus the toolbar.
Yes you had full screen like any pdf editor (except exemptions like Okular) but when you want a comforting contrasting black background and transitions, there was none.
It's just a hide toolbars option like a browser.
Adobe's full screen feels very slick to me especially when used on a netbook without a mouse.
It's not e-ink level of slick but the hotkeys feel like what you naturally stray towards to. Ctrl+ with zoom. No gimmicky pop-up slidehow button. Transitions. Even the sluggishness becomes a relaxant feature of sorts for a black text on white bg heavy pdf.
For pdfs with lots of image or are meant to be skimmed like manuals it does not have the same effect but I'd be hard pressed to find someone reading those in a full screen.
I think Scribus is just too sporadic to be the most advanced.
It's the only free kind but the interface just keeps changing sometimes.
I'm speaking as a Scribus ignorant user though.
My experience with it, is solely to replace Adobe Reader on Linux wherein I would manually retype a PDF into Scribus. Change the fonts and change the text to something other than white. Add highlights. Resize the blocks (which Scribus to my knowledge is very unique in due to it relying on a block frame type of typing/editing) and I would get a pdf that's worse when it's shown full screen in Adobe but very relaxing and easy on my eyes to skim when in a non-full screen and lightweight PDF viewer especially as I tend to design it like a bunch of longer more vertical index cards.
In that experience, one Scribus version seemingly had more default colors than a newer Scribus version I used. I don't know if it's a custom one as the titles except version numbers are the same.
It did not help that there's Scribus-ng which when I tried, did not seem to be any much different on the surface than Scribus and as I do not know anything about colors to begin with, I had to resort to the default colors which Scribus even touts as a feature.
There's also many redundancy in the actual site that makes me skeptical about the design direction of Scribus because the actual program has the same redundancies. They obviously have some good things but just the way to jump around the wikis and just the way you then get the software and open the software and then have two ways to edit the formatting of a text... a part of me thinks it's more fitting to be called a word processor...a sort of OpenOffice Writer+ than a PDF editor/desktop publisher so it can support more formats and streamline the ui more which would hopefully streamline the website's more but it's more of a musing of how many confusing things Scribus has.
It has books, click on the book on the site, you jump to a wiki instead of a library on the site.
It has PDF features but you can't even understand it until you understand what editing options will happen in the CTRL+Y window, what editing will happen if you do not ctrl+y, what editing is in what section in their version of the property windows and that's how you start with the basics.
Any introduction I read on the program keeps ranting on and on about rulers but it's not very easy to spot an instant template style auto-margin settings anywhere in the program that instantly quickly aligns several blocks of frame nor do you really have a text w/ image template layer, a to be reviewed layer or even a straight forward text edit layer. So many individual interfaces to battle with.
The long text editor is a mini-rtf editor style but it keeps insisting it's some form of story editor and so every formatting option is a search for the right term Scribus' uses and if you do not know anything about desktop publishing, the only consistent part is the margins and the height/length numbers as that's in every new file and it's not like it's on the level of Scrivener where you start getting why you should stick to this template over the other template. It just pretends like you know what to do with a new file and so god forbid you actually import a file first.
A lot of these sound like nitpicks and they are but that just haunts Scribus since time immemorial and I'm not the first to remark on it and I don't think I would be the last. It's just a very very unique unknown identity in the realm of pdf editors and it shouldn't be. It should be OpenOffice+ or full featured Scrivener for Linux or Calibre for PDFs or Word/PowerPoint combined but it just keeps insisting on desktop publishing to even be remotely be any advanced something.
It's really the definition of a confused software. It's a simple software with some advanced feature but because it likes to play in a direction it's not offering any superior concept to compared to it's competitor, it just does not become advanced and it gives excuses for why it's not advanced ("cause DTP is not this or that") GIMP at least knows it's competing with Photoshop.
Scribus has these genius
oh so advanced words:
http://wiki.scribus....rd_Processing_vs_DTPA DTP application is not intended for creating text — at least if one is talking about a large amount of text, ie. many pages. For this purpose, it's better to use a word processor or a simple text editor (with or without markup). After the text is finished it can be loaded into the DTP application. From this point, only minor changes to the text are done in the DTP application — you don't want to edit long texts this way. This separation comes from the division of responsibilities in professional publishing: one person creates the text content, and another person does the layout.
Hello??? Scribus being more of an indexed card DTP than it's pro equivalent makes it easy to create text inside if it only autosaves and has an index card database like Scrivener. It just insists on not having a storage clipboard within the program editor so you can move section 1 of chapter 2 from within the story editor but it just
insists that it has to be a DTP and so the editor tends to be stuck on a page yet the way to jump from section to section is more intuitive when you're creating text rather than editing and copy-pasting predefined text as then there's an actual reason to have the story editor that does not mimic the real time elements of direct editing but it tries to be part-Lyx/Latex philosophy, part-DTP, part annoying limiting page only story editor with no preview, part mclunky, part margin hogging, layer inducing DTP/PDF editor exporting whatisname.
You really have to experience it to really judge for yourself I guess. For my non-pro needs, it's a wonderful one of a kind free software but as any one label: DTP, PDF editor, PDF exporter
...it's bonkers. It's bonkers when it's trying to be a DTP and it's bonkers when it's not being a DTP:
Only in Scribus land where you can have a software that's aimed at professionals and then say:
Something probably not a good idea is to plan to use Scribus for the first time on an important piece of work with a tight deadline, like tomorrow morning. Even those who have some DTP experience would likely be frustrated by that task (and would probably know better than to attempt it). If Scribus just makes up it's mind and focus a little bit on text to page movability and hiding some micro-numbers as advanced, this thing could be a legit advanced Scrivener but arrghh...
If it could make it's image importing more direct in the default toolbar, IMO it would be OneNote already minus an actual database to store the output and a mini tray note icon pop-up.
Also I don't know if this is the frustration speaking but when I import a normal pdf into Scribus, a part of me feels like I just imported a .doc into OpenOffice especially the early years. It could just be that I find the commands much more comforting when creating pdfs in it but yes, Scribus imports PDFs and when it exports it, it even has a stoplight sign for what section of your PDFs is out of alignment or hidden but it's just not a program where you can immediately jump to editing if you just want to edit.
It's advanced in the same way any graphics program beyond Paint is advanced.
Again, if I recall, there are layers. There's hyper-specific numbers for fonts.
Lots of unique stuff but it's not really a DTP or PDF editor in the traditional sense. It's not just Photoshop with a weird interface like GIMP. It's like if both Photoshop and GIMP focused entirely on improving their text inserting features but decided they still want to be a graphics program in everything including the lay-out so you get a sort of advanced way to move/reflow/work with text and image positions but then the actual environment remains the same as a photo editor so the features, the toolbars, the philosophy...it exist but it's all over the place.
