[Scribus] Scribus Feature Requests and Discussion

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 19:41, Louis Desjardins wrote:
> ? (At) 12h30 +0800 24/05/04, Craig Ringer ?crivait (wrote) :
> 
> [...]
> 
> >  > I think Quark and Indesign have
> >  > this implemented in a similar manner.
> >
> >If Quark does it, I'd love to know how. Maybe it was added in Quark 5 or
> >6 (but that'd mean getting something for your upgrade money, so I'm not
> >convinced), but all I have been able to find is the usual linked image
> >ability.
> 
> Actually, what Quark has done within 6.0 is a dynamic update of text 
> content within "user tagged" text boxes. Say you have a book title on 
> the front page, and that title is repeated in various pages in your 
> document, and on the spine and back cover (that could all be part of 
> the same "cover" page), you could tag this text so any change would 
> reflect wherever it is used in the document, keeping the specific 
> styles and text enrichments for each use.

I take it that Quark 6 does this tagging in such a way as that the
master text is stored within the Quark document, rather than an external
file? That's nice, but not really what I'm thinking of, as the key idea
in my case is to get the copy editors away from Quark.

Here's what I'm thinking of:
----
Author: Lesley
Section: Community News
Heading: Dog eats man

Body text here blah blah blah blah
ssdf blah bsdasdf a kbj bkah blah

Caption1: The dog, looking guilty
----

The above is what I'd be looking for in the end - a way to keep all text
content in a single file, and be able to "update" the page in the DTP
app to pull in changes. Changes in the DTP app could also update the
data file. I strongly suspect some form of markup would be required to
achieve this, however. XML, inevitably ;-)

I'm actually wondering if I could do this with a Python script. That
raises the interesting possibility of pulling the text out of a database
instead of a marked up file, too. Drat - yet another thing goes on my
long TODO list.

The difficulty would be tagging the text fields with the record ID and
field. Is there any way for scripts to attach extra data to objects like
textboxes?

When looking over the Scripter API docs, I also didn't spot a way to
create linked text boxes. Is this possible?

Oh, and guys: Thanks again for all the wonderful work. I know I usually
come forward with issues, but that's all in the interest of ironing out
things I think make it harder to use Scribus in my particular field of
experience. I definitely appreciate all your work, and I love watching
the way the app develops.

Craig Ringer