[Scribus] Index

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 11:10:42 -0400
"John R. Culleton" <john at wexfordpress.com> dijo:

> > Might it be possible to link makeindex or xindy, or some other open
> > source indexing utility, to Scribus somehow? It would be cool to
> > have an indexing utility for Scribus.
> 
> Yes it would. But makeindex is effectively a standalone program. One 
> pass thorugh Tex generates the IDX file from embedded tags , then 
> makeindex is run creating the ind file, and the next run of TeX finds 
> the ind file and imports it  into the document. This three run 
> process can be hidden somewhat by a driver program but that would 
> have no applicability to Scribus. 
> 
> The best implementation I can see is a four step process:
> 1. Run scribus and create a final pdf.
> 2. Run a pdf reader program and manually transfer the index items and 
> their page numbers into an .idx file, perhaps using a little Tcl/Tk 
> program to help ease the process (spinner for page number etc.)
> 3. Run makeindex, 
> 4. Flow the finished index file into scribus as text.
> 
> I have asked for help in copying/ pasting words from Scibus itself, 
> thus eliminating step 1, modifying step 2, and incorporating step 3 
> as part of the original Scribus run.  Haven't read the replies yet. 

I have thought of a differrent approach - OpenOffice.org. Suppose we
had a 500-page book to index. What if we could select the text (in
linked frames, presumably) in the Scribus document, copy and paste into
Writer, with a manual page break at the points where the pages break in
the Scribus document. Then the user can just use OOo's wonderful
indexing utility to create the index. Having done so, copy and paste
the index back into the Scribus document. The advantage is that OOo's
indexing facility is easily the equal of InDesign's with a great and
easy to understand GUI interface.

The problem with this is the page breaks. For our hypothetical 500-page
book you'd have to hit Ctrl-Enter 500 times, while checking each one
against the Scribus document. If that could be automated somehow, it
would work perfectly.

Another approach might be to see if OOo's indexing code could be
adapted for and integrated into Scribus to give us a built-in indexing
tool.

Personally, I need Scribus to have all the integration with OOo that it
can. I'd love to have copy/paste working reliably between the two, and
when pasting into Scribus it would be great to have Scribus import
styles as well. But further discussion of that needs its own thread.