[Scribus] Ideas on collaboration

[Oleksandr Moskalenko]

* Christoph Sch?fer <christoph-schaefer at gmx.de> [2005-06-22 14:16:22 +0200]:

> Hi Alex,
> 
> >If you have use a  textframe as entity wouldn't that make a problem in the 
> >case of connected frames if the amount of text in the editable frame 
> >increases? What to to with the overflowing text? For me your approach with 
> >a paragraph as "editable text block" seems more logical. But this is just 
> >a thought of me.
> 
> Let me put it that way: I considered the frame based approach (including 
> linked frames) useful for large projects like books. In such projects, 
> authors will work on their text without any connection to the final 
> layout (that's how it works at the moment anyway). Ralf-Diether's 
> objection concerning large amounts of texts won't be solved by more 
> granularity, because the problem remains, even if text can be edited on 
> a per paragraph base. This is a problem of discipline and clear 
> instructions.
> 
> However, I think it might be useful to have the opportunity to directly 
> edit the text per paragraph for smaller projects (newsletter etc.). So 
> why not prepare the file format to allow both, per frame as well as per 
> paragraph editing? Whether scribus or any other software will make use 
> of the oppurtunities isn't something one should care about at the 
> moment, as long as the file structure allows for them.
> 
> Christoph

Christoph,

The capability to edit either a frame or a particular paragraph inside that
frame or a block of text inside that paragraph has in a sense already been
implemented in the nascent 1.3.x xml file format as all canvas objects plus
paragraphs and "unistyle" text blocks inside paragraphs can be referenced and
changed at any time. So, I think depending on the particular product - a book
or a classified paper the access level granularity could be set at a text
frame or a paragraph to steer the workflow. This is fine and doesn't directly
concern the file format anymore once it allows for such control in the first
place.

The discussion on collaboration and on related issues is very useful for the
development of the new file format which will be flexible enough to allow
these kinds of work precisely because it is going to expose various DTP
workflows and corner usage cases well enough to lead us to tune up the new
file format before moving on to other parts that need attention.

So, please keep it going. Thank you for the very useful discussion.

Alex