[Scribus] Adaptable layout templates

[Michael Koren]

Timo Stollenwerk wrote:
> 
> Hi Ludwig,
> 
> Ludwig M. Solzen schrieb:
>> The more difficult part is of course to
>> display the FOP output within the Scribus GUI environment, so that the
>> user
>> could refine the automated output manually.
> 
> That's a question I've also asked myself. This would require a XSLT
> Stylesheet FO->SLA. Did you ever compared the Scribus file format with
> FO in detail?
> 
>> In a later stage, it would be great if Scribus could actually export xslt
>> stylesheets.
> 
> Do you mean the transformation SLA->FO? I don't think this is possible
> because you can do much more in Scribus than in FO.
> 
>> In any case, I would strongly recommend to use xsl and xsl-fo
>> syntax/vocabulary to define the templates.
> 
> As I wrote before, there are approaches to define adaptive layouts in
> fo. So you wouldn't have to start from the scratch if you can adapt
> something from fo.
> 
> timo
> 

I guess my take on this has been a little different than what you guys are
describing. When I think of a layout style for scribus, what I have in mind
from the user's perspective is something which is created interactively in
the GUI and then saved, like any other style in Scribus. I really wasn't
concerned so much with the internal representation of the style; to the user
the style is what's in the GUI, not an XML stylesheet to be edited by hand.

My thinking was that it would be relatively straightforward to adapt the
existing property set of a scribus object--position, size, text attributes,
whatever--to allow it to be defined relative to another object. I think it's
probably partially done already to support the new style inheritance system,
but I would extend the system to support sequences of objects with relative
properties. All of this would mean only a tweak to both the existing file
structure and the existing GUI elements, as I would be storing the same
properties, just with a tag for if they're relative.

Thus my feature set and the style representation are both most naturally
derived from what's already in Scribus, and in fact I don't plan for my core
code to "see" any of that at all, only the abstract dependency relationships
between the objects. That said, a converter or interpreter for existing
stylesheets would be an obvious desirable, and if either of you has any
references to existing implementations I'd like to look at them for test
cases to make sure my implementation can handle their features, as I'd like
it to be as generic as possible.

Michael
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