[Scribus] Applescript to python tutorial?

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 12:15 +0000, John Kershaw wrote:

> Attached (plain text - you'd need Quark and Filemaker running to 
> compile it).

Thanks, that's much appreciated. Well, except for the "argh, now I have
to try to remember AppleScript" bit ;-)

> a) query Filemaker for the list of branch codes (one per office)
> b) loop through branches, grab double box properties then singles box 
> properties
> c) place double boxes in 'middle' of each page, according to a 
> pre-determined 'best appearance' lookup table. Boxes appear to be 
> octagonal (no, really), but are actually composed of two irregular 
> hexagons abutted to each other, sitting atop a black octogon. They're 
> 1pt smaller than the octagon, so it looks like a single box with two 
> halves
> d) pull picture from Finder, resize. Add text from Filemaker

Thanks for the description, that's much appreciated.

Can I get you to send me a Quark document with the result too? Even with
no content or dummy content, so long as it has the right frames etc on
it, that'd be handy.

I have Quark 4 for Mac available.

I'm reading over your script now, but having a sample doc to compare to
would help a lot. Sorry I haven't done so earlier.

> The branches stopped using Filemaker ages ago, now everything's run 
> via MySQL online. We export from MySQL to tab-separated, and then 
> back into Filemaker to run the script. Presumably with a scripter 
> setup we could grab directly from the MySQL database on the web?

It sure can - in fact, I have a demo right here to do that (well, it
uses PostgreSQL, but it should be a one-line change to port it to
MySQL). I haven't released it because, frankly, without text metrics
it's just a bad demo. I should see if I can make it do some best guesses
and pop it up so folks can at least see how to connect Scribus and MySQL
using Python (answer: it's *really* *easy*).

-- 
Craig Ringer