[Scribus] Finding a 'mail merge' script

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 10:44 -0500, Keith.Gunderson at act.org wrote:
> ***rambling intro****
> As a new user, I want to thank the scribus team and scribus users for their
> work.  I've curiously watch as you've progressed over the past year or so.
> I'm thrilled to be able to engage myself in the hobby of DTP and design
> using Scribus (and Photoshop plus GIMP.)  I hope to progress into the GIS
> and CAD printing in the near future. I do expect to contribute to the
> development as I'm an experienced software engineer (C++ and python, in
> fact.)

Great. More helping hands never to any harm. Scribus is a very
interesting project to work with, and there's a lot to do. 

If you have much experience with C++/Python bindings, especially with
Qt, then I'd be very interested in picking your brains.

> And speaking of engagement, I completed the design of my wedding
> invitations yesterday.  I brought the PDF to the printer this morning
> (actually just a simple color laser job onto cardstock) and the results
> looked fantastic on the first try.  Man am I happy!
> 
> ***actual question
> Can someone share an 'mail merge' python script that I can use to print out
> my invitation envelops (using scribus 1.3.0) ?   I saw a mailmerge.py URL
> that was posted to the list last year, but the link is dead now.

That was me. I don't seem to have that script around any more, I'm
afraid. That was before I started keeping even my scratch scripts in
CVS.

The general concept I used was very simple: scan the document for frames
beginning with a given name prefix, then use the rest of the name as a
key into a dictionary. Using that key, look up the substitution text,
and set the text of the frame to that.

It was limited to setting the full text of a frame, but in most cases
that's alright. You could probably write a script that scanned the text
of a frame for certain delimeted ||FIELDS|| and replaced them instead.

Unfortunately, I lack the time to write anything like that right now...
I'm rather busy enough with Scribus, work, and uni. If you're interested
in writing one though, feel free to drop in on IRC (#scribus on
irc.freenode.net) and if I'm about I might be able to help out.

--
Craig Ringer