[Scribus] Ideas on collaboration [was: How do you guys share scribu files for collaboration?]

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 04:33 +0200, Christoph Sch?fer wrote:
[SNIP]
> Plain text files are easy to handle for cvs-like programmes and 
> databases. An ideal (text) workflow would consist of text workers 
> writing their texts in a fashion they are used to and after approval of 
> all participants commiting their collaborative work to a database in 
> plain text.

And I'm presuming that that includes sub'ing so that text which should
be "bold" will be so and headers will be so? That's a whole lot of
educating. (sort of using a text editor to write LaTeX!)

> With pictures, the situation is similar, though not exactly the same. 
> Imagine a newspaper with predefined fields for ads: Instead of manually 
> inserting the ad in scribus, a special database field entry would 
> receive the ad for the current issue from a database.

Isn't this already being done? Maybe not for the text, but seems to me
the Pics are done as links. (but the caveat is that if the pics are
moved, the links don't get updated. (figures anyway))

The scripting part is interesting though.


> As Craig noticed, it would need someone to implement it, but I think the 
> database approach is a means to KISS ("keep it simple, stupid"), as long 
> as scribus will provide the interface. It will be much more difficult to 
> educate the $office_suite users. As Louis has mentioned many times 
> before, DTP is, to a large extent, a social process, so the coders 
> aren't necessarily responsible for failures.

As some would say, the text are more important, and if Scribus can
separate the TXT from the others then it would be great. Sort of like an
OOo file which is zipped up XML, only that scribus zips up the TXT
independent of all the layout/Pics/etc files. That would make diffs even
simpler.





-- 
Ow Mun Heng
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