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

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-06-22 at 13:50 +0200, Peter Nermander wrote:
> > Really? Unicode is very well supported these days, and should be the
> > default of the majority of text editors. Additionally, I see few issues
> 
> So, can you tell me which editor on my Windows machine will handle unicode?

All of them? I don't know ... MS Word and OO.o certainly, probably
WordPad too. I expect even notepad does but I can't be sure.

>  And
> also how do I insert for example an ohmega sign in that program?

Start->Programs->Accessories->Character Map, or if the program supports
it whatever "insert special" it has.

> > with importing OO.o files personally - a template could be supplied with
> > all the styles they're allowed to use precreated.
> 
> But how do you prevent people from using "direct" bold and italics in the test?

With difficulty, unfortunately. I'm not convinced there's a technical
solution to idiocy and the unwillingness to listen ... sometimes you
just have to tell them "if you use bold/italic we'll just ignore it, use
our styles" - then ignore bold/italic.

I'd consider providing an OO.o macro that they have to use to save the
text (say it inserts a marker to indicate it was used to save) that
checks for such problems and yells at the user. I don't like macros, but
that might be a valid use case for them.

> Can that be locket in OO.o? (I've not used it very much, to slow on my
> machine, but in MS Office you can use paragraph and character styles the same
> way, but there is no way preventing people from pressing Ctrl-B to make their
> text bold (and that text will not get a character style but be directly
> formatted).

Probably do-able with macros. I'd prefer to do it with a pre-save
document check though.

> That is the main problem. Telling them what they should use is not problem, the
> problem is to prevent the from using other ways to format the text.
> 
> That's why I love using LyX. Probably a custom made SGML or XML DTD would work
> too, using for example Amaya as editor
> 
> Using HTML has a very good advantage too: You can use different CSS-files to
> try out different formatting, without any changes to the text itself.

Yes.... but users seem to have major problems with even the /concept/ of
markup, let alone writing it. If you have technical writers / editors,
then fine - and you're VERY lucky. For example, half of the journalists
here can barely turn on their computers - and frequently "turn off the
computer" by turning off the screen.

--
Craig Ringer