[Scribus] text manipulation in script

[Randolph Bentson]

I'm writing a script which opens a page and places several text
boxes therein.  Different invocations of this script will have
different amounts of text to put in the boxes, so I'd like to know
how to create the right size box or how to resize the box to fit
the text once it's been inserted.

I have been unable to figure out how much space is taken up by the
text, or how to determine that the box is too small.

Can anyone give me some hints on how to deal with this?

=========
I have a separate concern which appears when one variation of this
script appends a number of pages to the document.  It seems that
appending page N+1 takes longer than appending page N, which suggests
that the sla file is being rescanned each time one opens a page.
Is this true?

=========
I've also noted a number of run-time X error reports, some of
which cause Scribus to abort.
An example of this is
    The program 'RecipeLayout.py' received an X Window System error.
    This probably reflects a bug in the program.
    The error was 'BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)'.
    ...
What additional information can I provide to help debug this?


-- 
Randolph Bentson
bentson at holmsjoen.com