[Scribus] Ideas on collaboration

[Craig Ringer]

Marvin Dickens wrote:

>Hello Everybody,
>
>I have found this thread interesting. What I'd like to see
>is more of a general feature. It would support and further
>collaboration, but would have other uses. Specifically, I'd like to 
>see a tool within scribus that did the following:
>  
>
I'm curious as to why you'd want that within Scribus. To me, the 
description you gave absolutely screams "external utility". Nothing 
stops GUI integration with Scribus being possible, of course, or even 
enhanced features and interaction with Scribus. It's even possible to 
write a C++/Qt application as a library, then run it either standalone 
or load it into Scribus via a plugin (I want to explore this approach 
with lprof).

If you or anybody else feels really enthused about this idea, I'd be 
very happy to do what I could to assist with the build system and with 
getting the library and standalone-or-plugin trick working. I'm hoping 
to write a "hello world" demo of this approach soon, just to make sure 
it works and to help anyone who wants to do it with "real" programs later.

>Strips out text, photos and graphics from OpenOffice docs
>into 3 separate and distinct files types. Text is saved as
>ordinary ASCII text. ASCII is the lowest common denominator
>and is infinitely portable.
>
I *strongly* suggest UTF-8. Using ASCII would result in data loss.

>Each photo and graphic in a document
>is stripped out and individually saved as a single distinct file - Preferably
>the original file type of the photo or graphic file.
>
This shouldn't be too hard ... you can get to the photos in an OO.o file 
pretty easily by just unzipping it :-)

>A 4th file would contain 
>all of the formating of the original openoffice doc.
>  
>
I think that's harder to do in a way that relates it back to the other 
files. I could easily be wrong.

--
Craig Ringer