[Scribus] I really shouldn't open my mouth... but I'm going to

[Calum Polwart]

On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 08:57 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
<snip>
> 
> > 3. Lack of booklet printing.  I know all the work around etc etc etc.
> > But these are Windows Users!  These are people who expect a paper clip
> > to pop up and ask if they need help writing a letter!  This is a very
> > common query on this list which makes me think it would be a popular
> > upgrade...
> 
> Yep. I think everybody's aware of the large group of users for whom it
> matters. Getting it done is another thing, since that group aren't
> exactly full of people volunteering to dive into some sometimes-hairy
> C++ code to implement it.

I guess that was what I was doing...?
> 
> > Now I may be wrong but I imagine this is possibly relatively easy to
> > code.
> 
> 1: No
> 
> 2: Collapsing runs is currently not easy at all; PDF object streams
> wouldn't be too hard but would only be compatible with Adobe Reader 6 or
> 7; true font subsetting is certainly not trivial even before you work
> around the myriad different bugs in clients.
> 
> 3: Probably not too bad. I had a bash at it myself but (surprise
> surprise) got bogged and ran out of time. It's certainly not a trivial
> job and requires changes to more than you might expect but it's far from
> impossible.
> 
Lets be clear - I never even contemplated that I could fix tables or the
character placement thing!!


> If you're prepared to spend a bunch of time learning the code base and
> learning C++ then yes, it's quite possible.

Ok - so my first starting point would be to learn some C++ - perhaps
I'll do that and come back to you when I've sussed out a bit more than
'hello world!'  - and then I'll come back to IRC.
> 


> No chance you could do any of this with a plugin. I'm not too sure what
> true table support would entail, but it'd probably be a lot of work in
> PageItem, the canvas, etc. However I think there's work in progress on
> this (?) .

Thought so - although could a plugin actually just import the A5 booklet
sheets into A4 in the right places?  Never expected to sort table
support - and likewise I also think someone is doing it as part of 1.3.4
from whats been said b4.
> 
> Booklet printing can be done in a couple of ways. There should be a big
> document on the wiki somewhere (no time to look right now) discussing
> different ways to tackle imposition. One of them - which I think is the
> easiest to implement and best suited to simple tasks like booklet
> printing - is to separate logical Scribus pages from "physical" PDF
> pages so that one PDF page may contain zero or more Scribus pages
> subject to suitable transformations. I've investigated this approach and
> dome some preliminary work that might help. Most of the work here is in
> pdflib .

Perhaps that's what I've just asked above?  A seperate scribus document
that draws the content from the master?  Is that what you describe?
I can't see a wiki that relates to this just using psnup and pstop
> 
> PDF size... well, there are a few areas to investigate here. 
Wasn't proposing to fix that - I'm not that daft!!

> If you're serious about any of this you might want to drop in on IRC and
> have a chat, since I've been a bit out of touch lately and there's some
> background on some of this that I don't know.
> 
> --
> Craig Ringer
> 
> 
> --
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