[Scribus] exchange data between Quark, InDesign, etc

[Suki Venkat, [TnQ]]

Hi (oops my e-mail went off while I was half-way - I was trying to do
CTRL+ENTER in "Evolution" to produce "Soft Enter" like in "Eudora"),

It is not a big-deal actually to transport InDesign or a Quark files to
Scribus. InDesign/Quark has mature XML export capabilities. The only
thing is that these things don't come ready-made, so you may have to use
the assistance of scripting people or some plugins. In InDesign you can
use "Map stlyes to Tags" and may be a little bit of Javascript/VBscript
to produce the required XML. The XML files can be imported into Scribus
through DSSSL or XSLT or any scripting language like PERL/Python/Tcl.
This a professional-way of doing it. If you are layman and you want a
quick way to dump the whole thing into Scribus, then I would suggest
that you proceed this way:
 InDesign/Quark -> Word/RTF -> OpenOffice -> Scribus.

If you want to edit on PDF you have to embed the fonts fully first and
even then you can only edit a line in Acrobat Propreitary, since each
line is a separate object. If you use Enfocus Pitstop (or SDK)
proprietary stuff you can even reflow and redo even a paragraph, but the
H&J may not match with the rest of the stuff. Its true that such things
aren't there in the Linux. Well the first thing will be to make a
software that can convert PDF format to OpenOffice format which is in
the realms of possibility. I think the rest will follow. The one
important catch in all these things will be that you need to have all
the fonts used in the PDF in your system.

Suki