[Scribus] Importing Coreldraw9 created eps files not too successful ..

[Craig Ringer]

On Fri, 2005-03-04 at 17:37 +0000, Julian Robbins wrote:

> The hardest ones may be my Coreldraw 9 files. I have created eps files 
> from CorelDraw and imported them into Scribus with varying degrees of 
> success. There are many different switches possible in Coreldraw for eps 
> creation, I really do not know which ones are important for most 
> successful importation into Scribus.

I'd hope most would work, but you will probably want to try to (a) embed
*all* fonts or convert them to outlines, and (b) avoid rasterising
anything on export if you can.

The EPS importer can't import raster images yet, so depending on the
images that may be tricky. Placing the EPS as an image will let Scribus
handle raster images fine, but at the cost of rasterising the entire EPS
using GhostScript - which may not be what you want.

> I am using Ubuntu 4.1, Scribus 1.2.1CVS Oct 2004, and  Ghostscript AFPL 
> 8.14 and littlecms 1.12

Glad to see you have a fairly recent gs. That'll help a *lot* with
getting reliable results from EPS import.

> The best results I get show text, but never any bitmap images.

That's a limitation of the importer as it currently stands.

> The rest 
> of the layout, ie lines etc are fine, but whenever I get text imported, 
> the text is always created as a series of shapes not as editable text.

I strongly suspect that may be the only way to do it accurately. Each
DTP app has very subtle rules about typography and importing editable
text layouts from a different DTP app would be pretty scary. Doing so
from PostScript might be even harder.

That said, I've been utterly surprised by import/export magic Franz
whips up before ;-)

> Coreldraw's eps export has an option to export as text or as curves but 
> this seems to make no difference.

Yep. AFAIK Scribus will convert PostScript text to curves/outlines on
import, as outlined above.

> I really want to make this work, but at the least need editable text 
> before this will be a semi- satisfactory system. Scribus itself is fine 
> for me, but I really need some means to import these Coreldraw files !!

In the end, it's a similar situation to importing any other DTP app's
files. Getting it right is probably nigh impossible, and certainly an
utterly enormous job - though depending to some extent on how much
tolerance you have for error and inaccuracy.

While Corel Draw isn't strictly a DTP app, I fear many of the same
issues probably apply to its file format, especially if it permits lots
of control of text and very complex gradients.

If/when I ever migrate work to Scribus, I expect we'll simply use Quark
and Scribus in parallel (possibly keep a couple of decrepit old MacOS 9
boxes for Quark) rather than try to import anything. We'd need to re-do
all our templates and long-running regular ads, which would be a real
pain, but I don't see any viable alternative. Importers would be such a
huge amount of work, and we'd probably need to do as much work checking
the imported documents as we would recreating them from scratch anyway.

Well, not unless someone drops in and devotes Adobe-sized resources to
writing importers for proprietary formats like Quark, CorelDraw, and
InDesign documents. I'm not holding my breath ;-) .

My view is that if OO.o have as much trouble getting even "close enough"
import of Word files, which are both more documented (not to say well
documented, but there is info out there) and simpler than most DTP
formats, with their greater resources, DTP format importers for Scribus
are probably not going to be practical. The difficulty Adobe had getting
their Quark 4 importer even remotely reliable further reinforces this
view.

As such, I think it'd be better to focus on getting really reliable and
accurate imports of standard formats like EPS and SVG. That's just my
personal opinion though, and I presently lack both the time and the
expertise to put any weight behind them.

--
Craig Ringer