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

[Oleksandr Moskalenko]

* Christoph Sch?fer <christoph-schaefer at gmx.de> [2005-06-22 15:56:09 +0200]:

> Hi Alex,
> 
> >I would like to second Craig's position on Unicode vs markup. I've run into
> >an issue with a multitude of special hyphens and spaces defined in the
> >Unicode standard already while working on the new file format. I will
> >defend to the last breath the current consensus position that it is more
> >efficient to use Unicode instead of inventing elements for all the special
> >formatting cases or reusing those from other markup systems. OOWriter
> >importer is the tool for the job here.
> >
> >Alex
> 
> I don't think Unicode and markup are mutually exclusive. Working with 
> Unicode lets you define markup sets for any given purpose as soon as 
> character styles are available.
> 
> IMHO, it is quite reasonable to let markup sets be defined by the 
> publisher and instruct the authors on their use. For instance, an 
> English native speaker will easily understand <em></em> tags as 
> "emphasise", but for a German native speaker <bet></bet> would be more 
> intuitive. As Craig pointed out, all it takes is a working Get Text 
> plugin. This would provide users all over the world with a maximum of 
> flexibility.
> 
> Another advantage is that you don't have to run different file formats 
> through OOo (including all uncertainties) before using them in scribus.
> 
> Christoph

Christoph,

I think our points of view are not contradictory in the least. We are talking
about different types of formatting. I think it is fine to create a "text
markup element reference matrix" capability of sorts to allow various
publishing houses to define their own sets of simple text markup elements and
plug those into a standard converter to the scribus character format. That way
your English, German, Russian, Japanese, or whatever shop could define the
formatting elements in their native language to make it easy to create markup
that their local authors would be willing to adopt consistently. Then, they
provide a conversion table and all import happens transparently from then on.

Cheers,

Alex