[Scribus] Ideas on collaboration

[Gregory Pittman]

Oleksandr Moskalenko wrote:

>Christoph,
>
>Would you make a definite statement that you are considering the text frames
>to be an adequate level of abstraction? Would there be a need to become more
>granular and go to text blocks within the text frames? As we transition to
>character styles, every contiguous block of text that belongs to the same
>character style becomes a separate entity that can be referenced and
>substituted in its entirety. I would really like to arrive at a consensus
>about the "editable text block" granularity if possible.
>
>  
>
>It seems that the discussion leads us to the conclusion that every scribus
>object, not just text but svg, eps, raster images and whatever else, is
>becoming a data entity. Then a document is put together by referencing these
>entities and providing canvas co-ordinates and functional relationships
>(page/layer for example) between them.
>  
>
If you look at the .sla files with a text editor, it's not difficult to 
eventually get a sense of the pattern of the various elements.  On the 
other hand, visually it's not easy to find a particular object or 
document feature.
I think that there could (soon?) be an effort to "clean up" the 
appearance and layout of the XML-like format so that it is more easily 
understandable.  For example, use of carriage returns and indentation 
would help a great deal.  One might argue that the files are not meant 
to be hand-edited, but in fact I think that files which are easily 
understood by viewing them will also be easier to parse, and parsing is 
the key to any kind of assessment as to the differences between two 
versions and then reconciling them.

Greg