[Scribus] Database publishing for Scribus

[Gregory Pittman]

Calum Polwart wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 12:02 +0000, Calum Polwart wrote:
>> On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 07:06 -0800, Bolo Cholo wrote:
>>> Dear friends,
>>>
>>> I'm new to Scribus, and I'm looking for a way to import a database 
>>> file to publish a directory with Scribus.
>>>
>>> For that purpose, I've been using QuarkXPress with the XData 
>>> extension. All it does is format in XPress an imported tab (or 
>>> comma) separated text file.
>>
>> I need to do something simillar.  Its a once a year job so doesn't 
>> need to be hugely automated.  My solution has been to import the data 
>> into OpenOffice, apply basic formatting there (some of my data needs 
>> to be in italics depending on its 'type') and then import it over to 
>> Scribus.  (I think I used HTML as the import method)
I've been playing around with this on a small scale, with some 
Postgresql tables I have. Postgresql has the ability to export as HTML, 
but it turns out this is most unhelpful since Scribus doesn't know what 
to do with table tags. I tried a CSV approach, but it had some problems 
with the way that Postgresql exports, and some data disappears for some 
reason. What seemed to work best was to set the output as unaligned in 
psql (\a) and the field separator as a TAB (\f  '\t').

Then you simply import as text. What you are left with is the job of 
aligning the tabs, which to some extent can be done in Story Editor, but 
the what looks good in Story Editor may not necessarily on the page, 
depending on the font and its style, so more tweaking is likely. More 
consistent-length data will require less tweaking.

Greg