[Scribus] Back with perl and scribalbum.pl

[Gregory Pittman]

Well, like it or not, I've created a perl program that will take a 
directory full of image files and create and Scribus "album", so to speak.

Eventually I want to use it as a cataloguing feature -- I've got so many 
directories with digital photos in them that I can't keep them straight. 
Here is my first attempt -- it works, and Scribus doesn't choke on the 
files.
Later I want to add text frames with the filenames beside the picture -- 
one could right-click on Info to get the name in Scribus of course.  
Also am thinking about automatically adding blank text frames for 
annotating with Story Editor later, if desired -- could do this 
manually, of course, but when you're talking about hundreds of pictures....

Some caveats:
1. There are few safeguards so far.  The first thing I want to add is a 
line to only select image files. Right now, your directory should only 
have images in it.  I did run it on a directory with a subdirectory, and 
it made an image frame out of the subdirectory name -- Scribus just 
showed it blank.

2. There's only one format -- using a US Letter size page, with four 
staggered images, all the same size.  It will make as many pages as it 
takes to use up the files in the directory.

3. It is not especially elegant. But it works.

So, when you run it, it asks for a directory name (advice: use absolute 
paths -- see below), then asks for the name of the Scribus file to make, 
after which the .sla file is created VERY fast.  I don't know if Scribus 
files have an upper limit in size, but this program will make them as 
big as it needs to. 

Is this a bug?  -- While I was analyzing the Scribus file format, I 
noticed that the image filenames are relative paths, not absolute; this 
means that if you copy a Scribus file using cp, for example, to another 
directory, Scribus won't be able to find the images (found out this was 
indeed true).  Seems like they ought to be absolute paths.

Greg
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