[Scribus] fun with chess diagrams

[jrm at kw.igs.net]

Hello.  Pursuant to help from this list - thank you very much! - I have
successfully laid out a couple of issues of Chess Canada magazine using
Scribus.  Now I am smoothing out some details.

For diagrams of chess positions, I have been using fonts that come with
a commercial product, ChessBase.  The result, more or less, is that a
diagram is a ten-by-ten array of characters to be set in a special font.
Readers are used to having each diagram appear at the appropriate place
within a game, so I do not want to float them.  So I have the diagrams 
embedded within text.

What bothers me is how easily diagrams get broken up when I make minor
adjustments.  What I would *like* is to apply a "keep with next" property 
to every line (but the last) of a diagram.  This can be done in Open Office
Writer, but the property is lost when importing into Scribus, at least
with the 1.2.3 versions.  Has this changed, or is it likely to?

Alternatively, perhaps I can somehow make each diagram into a graphic to be
embedded into the text.  Probably I'm being very obtuse, but I don't even see
how to embed a graphic.  How do I embed a graphic?

Also, it is not obvious to me what would be a good way to put text into a
graphic.  Because this will be a frequent operation, I would want to script
it, to avoid rasterization of the text, and to keep precise control of the
suze of the graphic.  Suggestions?

Incidentally, my PDFs generated with Scribus produce (apparently harmless)
error messages about "xobject not found" when using the ChessBase diagram
fonts.  Has anyone else ever seen anything like this?  (My guess is that
there is something a little odd with the font, which apparently was getting
by PageMaker but is annoying Scribus.)

--
John (MacPhail)