[Scribus] Back with perl and scribalbum.pl

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 11:28, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> 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.

Cool. I like the "just generate a .sla" file approach ;-)

I've been having fun with the scripter, but I doubt you can beat rolling
your own .sla for sheer speed. 

> 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.

I personally think relative paths are a good idea for resources located
in subdirectories of the directory the document is saved in. Many DTP
users structure working directories like this:

jobs/job1
jobs/job1/pics
jobs/job1/fonts
jobs/job1/job.sla
jobs/job2/
jobs/job2/pics
jobs/job2/fonts
jobs/job2/job.sla

etc. This is especially true in larger or shared environments. It
quickly becomes desirable to keep all the resources needed for a job
together, especially when you want to grab a working copy, etc.

I suppose 'collect for output' would significantly reduce the need for
that feature, but I still tend to favour keeping most resources for a
job in the one place. (aside: Collect for output doesn't seem to handle
fonts).

I see what you mean, though, about the relative paths in that they're
used even for directories 'outside' the working directory, so I see
relative paths like ../../../../test.png . I can't say I understand the
rationale behind that, but there could easily be good reasons I just
haven't picked up on.

Hmm, for one thing that method would be helpful if the user worked with
a structure like the above, but with the addition of:

jobs/stock
jobs/stock/logos
jobs/stock/graphics
jobs/stock/photos

etc.

Nonetheless, I too find the use of relative paths to locate files in
totally different parts of the filesystem somewhat odd.

--
Craig Ringer