[Scribus] Ideas on collaboration

[Christoph Schäfer]

>>> So, yes, in theory it can be done, but it would need someone with 
>>> sufficient knowledge in OOo programming.
>>
>>
>> Thank you Christoph!
>>
>> Can we dream that Scribus team and OO.o team develop some kind of 
>> friendly interface so users can achieve that kind of formatting easily?
> 
> It's called the UNO interface to OpenOffice.org, and it already exists. 
> It's non-trivial to utilize though, and some "impedence-matching" 
> between Scribus and OO.o would be required. Plus, of course, a bunch of 
> coding to connect Scribus up to UNO. There's a Python UNO interface, 
> PyUNO, and Scribus has a Python plug-in, so that might be a very 
> interesting approach once the facilities for formatting Scribus text 
> from Python can be improved (especially since I now know how to put 
> non-intrusive "hooks" for Python into Scribus to trigger on events). It 
> should also be possible to do interesting things from a C++ Scribus 
> plugin that uses UNO.
> 
> In addition to things like those mentioned above, a big potential use of 
> UNO is to write a "universal importer" that uses OO.o and its importers 
> to transparently import any document format understood by OO.o. Again, 
> it's just a matter of finding someone with the time and and interest to 
> investigate this.
> 
> --
> Craig Ringer

Hmmm, I figure connecting scribus and UNO will be quite a bit of work 
since UNO seems to be powerful but very complex.

Maybe an interim solution could be a stripped down version of OOo, using 
only basic formatting, import filters, collaboration features (compare, 
merge) and perhaps some database features for collaboration.

Having such a tool with a reasonable size, which would also be 
cross-platform, might be a way to escape the formatting hell of word 
processor documents.

In fact, something like that already exists. It's called StarOffice 4 
Kids. You can see some screenshots here: 
http://iug.uni-paderborn.de/Projekte/nutzware/staroffice4kids/de/ and 
download here: http://so4k.kippdata.com/
It's a stripped down version of StarOffice for use in primary schools, 
and the source code is available. There even exist three German 
equivalents of Masters thesises on the topic.

This wouldn't solve the markup problem, but at least offer a handy tool 
for contributing texts to a project without causing the DTP side too 
many headaches. The "Rich text editor" would save files only to *.sxw or 
OASIS, so importing into scribus could be almost painless.

Throwing out most of the unnecessary code might be easier than writing 
tons of new code.

Any ideas? If enough people think it would be useful, I'd contact the 
Paderborn University for more info.

Christoph