[Scribus] Pic format to yearbook specs.

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 11:16, Jim Christiansen wrote:
> Hello, I run a linux system of about 100 boxes in a grade 8 to 12 school and 
> plan to produce next year's yearbook using Scribus in a classroom setting.  
> I have our type1 fonts installed but the weak link (that I see now) is going 
> to be photo inserts.  Using Pagemaker I had a plugin from our yearbook 
> company called designer's edge.  The only feature that we used was the the 
> automatic picture/insertion tool in it.  It converted all images to tiff, 
> changed them to 300 dpi and grayscale all as an image was dragged into a 
> frame.  I can use imagemagic in a script to do this easy enough beforehand, 
> but I know that if this conversion was done on the fly (because our students 
> work with jpgs from our camers), I wouldn't have as many errors at the 
> publisher end.  Does anyone know how to make a feature in Scribus to do 
> this?

I'm going to give my characteristic answer, "hmm, you could write a
script to do that". While you can't intercept the insertion of a picture
and change the picture (yet!), you can provide users with an alternate
way of inserting images that does what you want.

You could use the Python Imaging Library from http://www.pythonware.com/
to do it in Python, or you could call ImageMagick from the script to do
the actual conversion. The scripter provides file open dialogs and other
handy things that make selecting the file pretty simple, and it can be
used to set the image in an image frame (or create a new frame with the
image in it).

One potential problem is that it'd be rather cumbersome having to
manually run the script every time you want to import a picture.

Conveniently, I'm working on something to help that. I've mostly
finished a GUI macro manager for Scribus that lets you put macros -
Python functions - in a menu and bind them to keyboard shortcuts. It
also provides a GUI macro editor where you can define and edit macros
written in Python, and facilities for automatically loading macros at
startup, importing macros and exporting macros.

It's working fine and should be done this week (fingers crossed). It
won't go into 1.2.1, but I'll be able to provide a nice neat patch
against 1.2.1 and I'm hoping it'll go into post-1.2.1 CVS. Perhaps it'll
be useful to you.

One thing it won't be able to do initially is put macros in the context
menus (right click menus), but I'm hoping to make that possible later.

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