[Scribus] Scribus Digest, Vol 53, Issue 14 Item 6 - importing WORD

[Craig Ringer]

John R. Culleton wrote:
> On Thursday 12 July 2007 04:56, Jfo wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I believe that for Scribus to be really useful in the general DPT
>> community it must import Word and Word Publisher text and graphics
>> WITH FORMATTING.
>>
> Do you mean Microsoft Publisher? I didn't think it was in serious use.

I get documents in MS Publisher format from clients occasionally. Only,
of course, when they manage to avoid every warning they're given at
every step that the company can not and will not accept jobs designed in
Publisher because we can not guarantee decent quality reproduction.

I've never seen a serious workflow involving Publisher.

> What Scribus needs most is a table formatter. TeX has several. Context 
> alone has three.   (Knuth plain tex, Wichura TaBle, Natural tables.) 
> I also use the TeXsis table writer by itself for formatting invoices. 
> so on table writing the score is TeX 4, Scribus 0.

That's one of the big ones I see come up a lot here. Other biggies that
people mention a lot include:

- Booklet printing / simple imposition (but workarounds exist)
- Performance tuning
- Editable master pages
- Enhanced text handling (getting there nicely)

People do mention Publisher import, but usually with a view to migration
from Publisher (in the hope they can avoid re-doing their layouts)
rather than as something they want as part of their workflow.

Of course, as we all know all this stuff is really hard and time
consuming :S

--
Craig Ringer