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

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 12:41 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 11:21 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> > 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!)
> 
> I personally like the idea of sub editors working in a "domain-specific"
> editor that knows about Scribus formatting - kind of like Adobe InCopy
> in principle. Using a special markup and a GetText plugin might be a
> viable alternative too.
> 
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=1791
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2108

Got to see those bug reports :-) (No I-net currently)
> 
> > > 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))
> 
> Supporting that would require help from the filesystem. It's do-able on
> Mac OS X using HFS, where each file has a unique ID that apps
> are /supposed/ to care about. It's probably do-able on UNIX within a
> given filesystem by relying on the inode number, but only in a way
> that's potentially hacky and gross. I see no way to do it across
> filesystem boundaries without help from the OS, and if network file
> systems are introduced ... ugh.

Ah.. That's an idea. using the FS as the database. But as mentioned,
with the current FS in *nix, it'll be hacky I guess

> > 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.
> 
> It's an interesting idea... I'll be sure to mention it to malex. I'd
> also be interested in /optionally/ being able to "bundle" linked images
> and even fonts into a self-contained file that's easily mailed around
> (not much more than collect-for-output zipped up, really).

Yep. My guess is that OOo is doing that of sorts. Makes distribution
simpler though I can't tell how that will help in using it for a
CVS/SVN/RCS based system for diffing the txt. I'm assuming that the text
is all that's important and the pics etc will come later. (They are
easier to lay-out compared to the text)

-- 
Ow Mun Heng
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