[Scribus] Text import using tags - any progress?

[Riku Leino]

Le Tigre wrote:
> Riku,
>
> as you may know, my english is a bit poor, but I'd like to explain the

Mine's not perfect either. That's why i provided a heavily edited version of 
my plan :)

> kind of thing that we (at "Le Tigre") need, and you might tell me if you
> think it's possible or not to manage it for next versions.

> I have to say first that I've found a strange method for making what
> what I want, but it's not really great.
>
> We receive many texts, from many softwares (OOO, Word on Win, on Mac,
> etc.). Those texts may have some italic, bold, etc. What we want is to
> keep those italics when importing to Scribus, but we also need to give
> the text a style, which is called "Texte_normal" and is our basic style.

Ideal situation would be if you could provide information to your writers on 
how you would like to get your text submitted. OOO and Word both has 
paragraph style in them. I'm not sure how rtf saved from Word will behave but 
that's one of my goals to provide a complete rtf importer. Taken rtf can also 
include the paragraph style information that would be the easiest approach 
here. You would tell your writers to use paragraph styles in their writing 
process. Then with my new additions it will be possible to remap those 
paragraph styles when importing to scribus. For example from an odt document 
you will be able to say something like this: Use Scribus' paragraph style 
ScribusBody1 to all pargraphs with the style Body1 in OO.o doc.

Another approach would be using tags. This doesn't limit the used file formats 
only to those that can be imported with the full style information but can be 
used with the importers that only handles the plain text information (like 
our current doc importer).  Tags could be used to mark for paragraph styles 
(an example from the current situation can be found from this article: 
http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Laying_out_articles). In the new system 
similar technique can be also used for charcter formatting.

> The method we use is: save the document in OO with a font that Scribus
> doesn't know (eg Nimbus Roman, which is on OO, but not on Scribus). *Of
> course* we'd better save the document in OO with the final font
> (Century), *but* I didn't manage to install fonts in OO...
> Then we import the text in Scribus, and use the function that replace
> the font (Nimbus to Century, Nimbus Italic to Century Italic, etc.).
> Then the text is in Scribus, with the good fonts, but not size, ledaing,
> etc.
> So we check what is the style that had been imported from OO, and then,
> we erase that style and replace it with the "Texte_normal". And then
> it's ok.

This sounds like a workaround in current situation where things doesn't quite 
work like they should. This will be fixed with the proper style remapping 
capabilities in the new system.

> What would be great would be: when we import the text, Scribus would
> say: the style is that, with that font, etc., would like to replace it
> with that style...

Exactly

> But but but the problem is with italic: because italic is another font,
> so we should be able to change the normal font AND the italic font, AND
> the bold font. Am I clear? (Something that would say to Scribus: if this
> text has italic in Nimbus, you have to keep the italic in Century).

Avox's work on the new text handling will make this possible. Ie. you can have 
paragraph style which has a charcter style. Character style says how the 
chars will be formatted but you can override these settings. Now when 
changing to a new paragraph style with a new character style Scribus knows 
the user's changes that were made over the current character style and thus 
can keep those changes with the new paragraph/charcter styles. The plan is to 
have something like "Remove overriding formatting" to reset the text to the 
plain paragraph/character style from custom formatting overriding the 
paragraph's character style's formatting.

Riku