[Scribus] text formatting (bullet lists, special characters, subscripts) suggestions...

[Peter Linnell]

Andrew,

See my comments in-line.

On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 15:33, Andrew Morrison wrote:
> I've done some searching through the documents and mail list archives,
> but have yet to come across a great answer for my question, so forgive
> me if I missed something really obvious.
> 
> I was wondering what is the preferred method for handling text with a
> lot of special formatting in it?  For example, I am working on the
> layout of a newsletter published by a group of scientists.  Normally,
> the articles are only text and images, and the layout is
> straightforward.  However, I have an article which includes a lot of:

> special characters,
Scribus can do via Extras >Insert Special No problem there.

>  bulleted lists,
Must be manually created. Fastest way is to add a long narrow text frame
beside the normal text frame and pick a bullet character from Extras
>Insert Special, size and space as needed. Using Creating Style speeds
this up. 

MS Arial has lots of good bullet characters and is more reliable than
Wingdings. Wingdings and Webdings have a weird MS encoding which does
not work 100% reliable in PDF. I've noticed the same issue with other
DTP apps on Win32. Your mileage may vary.

>  subscripts, superscripts 

Controllable from the Properties Palette. No problem there.
> and
> mathematical formulas. 
The tricky part. As they are coming from MS Word (ugh, double shudder),
you will probably need to export these sections *separately* from MS
Equation editor, hopefully as EPS or a PDF file created in Acro
Distiller.  This is the safest and most reliable way. Then import as EPS
or PDF.

Other DTP apps have the same issue handling Word docs with equations. It
sometimes requires special plug-ins for InDesign to handle these in a
DTP app. I can't recall the app, but there is an expensive, but
supposedly excellent plug-in for handling this.

A possible work around is to see if you can open this file in Open
Office 1.1.0 and re-export a PDF from the the Math editor in OO. Export
a "press" PDF. Then import this into Scribus. Scribus will handle the
PDF like an image.

So far, I have pretty impressed with the PDF exporter in Open Office
1.1.0 - not perfect, but it works reliably.


>   Obviously, importing the text in the normal way
> would require a lot of formatting to be done.  

I do not see how it can be done any other way.
>  So, I've been playing
> around with the eps import. 
EPS import is fine for logos and such, but extended text is not going to
work as well as you wish, as the fonts are rasterized before import. It
works, but the memory usage is going to be quite high when exporting
your final PDF. I have imported large EPS maps and exported them with
Scribus just fine, but you need lots of memory to do this. 
>  This is fine, if the text is short, but
> what if the article goes over several pages?  Or if it needs to start in
> the middle of the first page?  And accommodating multiple columns seems
> to be tricky as well...
> 
> Is there a preferred method for handling this type of text?

Another possibility if you have Adobe Illustrator 10 or Corel Draw 11 is
to open the PDF or EPS created the Equation editor, convert the math
fonts to outlines and then export SVG. Open the SVG in Sodipodi and
re-save as plain SVG, then import into Scribus.

When imported into Scribus, the characters sometimes may appear blank.
Do a drag selection around the imported SVG, un-group and select each
character and then double click into edit mode and then click on the
close path button. Then all the outlines will magically show up one by
one. It is tedious, but reliable and the output is scalable and
reliable. I used a similar method to recreate the Scribus logo as SVG
for a presentation. It worked beautifully. I am writing a tutorial on
this trick to convert PDF objects into SVG.

Handling Equations in any DTP app is not easy. This is one of those
corner cases where you need a lot of DTP tools and no one method is
always better than the other. It will take some experimenting, depending
on what apps and versions you have available.

Bottom line is you would need to re-create the text formatting for the
most part in any DTP app. MS Word import into InDesign or PageMaker has
its own issues with styles naming. 

It can be done in Scribus no doubt, but it will take more than just
Scribus to handle this.

Good luck,
Peter