[Scribus] Linked content

[avox]

Michael Koren wrote:
> 
> 
> Paul Fine-2 wrote:
>> 
>> The newsletter has an issue number which is incremented every month.  
>> This issue appears at the top of every left hand page, and also on the 
>> cover page.  The instance on every lefthand page is easily handled by 
>> putting it in the Master Page, but I want to link the frame on the cover 
>> so that I only have to change the issue number in one place. Is there a 
>> way to do this?
>> 
> 
> Hmm, linked content. That would be very useful and I think I've wanted to
> do it before too, but I don't think you can at the moment.
> 
> Some kind of content library approach might be nice in the future for this
> kind of thing. I suppose when externally linked text is available you
> could have all instances drawn from an external file (if external content
> could be at the character level), but that's a bit clunky.
> 
> Thinking about it, it may actually be possible that my summer of code
> project could allow this.
> 
> (Excuse the rest of this message while I think out loud here.... :)
> 
> It sounds like modifying the text engine, which I'm not doing, but I think
> I'm going to need to be able to preprocess text content anyway to support
> structured content before giving it to the text layouter, and I was
> planning to support sequences of frames with the same content.
> 
> If the content to be linked were tagged, e.g. with XML tags, both on the
> cover and in the master page, then a sequence selector (input filter)
> could isolate it and apply identity dependency relations between the
> instances, so that my library would automatically keep them synchronized
> when one instance is changed, but this mini-sequence across frames would
> be tagged non-structural so it's ignored by the default layout style.
> 
> This would be a common use case, so I could provide ready-made styles for
> it. From the user side it would be a matter of putting the tags around the
> content to be linked and using a style which inherits the relevant
> sequence selector...or once the content is in Scribus using such a
> charstyle on the content could be enough without special tags.
> 
> I just made that sound way more complicated than it is, but I don't know
> how else to describe it. :) Avox, what do you think about it?
> 
> Michael
> 


Ok, some text features which are planned for the future:

* generated content: counters, references, fields (which would take their
content from userdefined document attributes, or from std attributes like
author, filename, etc.)
* paragraph styles with different charstyle for first char / first word /
first line / chars upto first tab
* placing textframes on masterpage and editing their content on normal page
* a scripter function to determine the space a text needs when typeset in a
given textframe.

Don't expect any of this before 1.3.6 or 1.3.7, though.

There will also be a textmerge function which will pull content from SQL
and/or XML databases.

Another function which could be used is the CMS import/export which will
allow to pull the whole content
of a chain of textframes from a CMS (that's acurrent GSoC project).

/Andreas
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Linked-Text-Frames-tf3482158.html#a9743395
Sent from the Scribus mailing list archive at Nabble.com.