[scribus] TOC from several files

[John Culleton]

On Friday 12 December 2008 02:11:02 pm Craig Bradney wrote:
> On Friday 12 December 2008 16:37:06 a.l.e wrote:
> > salve
> >
> > > I am still of the opinion that Scribus is not the right tool
> > > for text heavy books with tables of content, indexes, footnotes
> > > and the like. For that work I use TeX, simply because Scribus
> > > is clumsy with long documents.  There are as they say horses
> > > for courses. You can do almost anything using almost any tool.
> > > But because of its basic design Scribus is not the optimal tool
> > > for books, and may never be.
> >
> > i like the way you start your sentence telling us that you
> > wouldn't write a text heavy book with some "advanced" features
> > which are not implemented yet in scribus (and here you are
> > actually right) and finish asserting that scribus is not an
> > optimal tool for books and may never be (which is not totally
> > wrong).
> >
> > are you an economist?
> >
> >
> > ciao
> > a.l.e
> >
> > p.s.: scribus is right now a good tool for some sort of books,
> > but certainly not for all sort of books!
>
> It certainly is - http://www.flesbooks.com/ :)
>
> Craig


Yes, I have ordered that book.  It is an admirable tour de force. I 
once heard of a man decades ago who ordered an IBM 1100, which only 
ran Fortran, and programmed his entire business system on it himself.  
That too  was an admirable effort. It was not however the most 
efficient way to put up a small business system. 

 For Scribus to be comparable to TeX for long books it needs to be 
able to justify a paragraph at a time, optionally use hanging 
punctuation, optionally use microtypography,  handle books of a 
thousand pages or more without subdividing the files,  provide for 
indexing, toc, automated footnoting, automatic placement of graphics, 
tables etc. on the current page or on the next page depending on how 
things work out, allow the insertion of a paragraph with automatic 
repagination as needed and automatic adjustment of both the toc and 
the index, provide a facility for putting out different page sizes 
and page orders with a simple switch from the same file,  draw 
bibliographic references from a bibliographic database, with 
automatic formatting and ordering of those entries depending on a bib 
style selection and etc. 

I said before almost anything can be done with almost any tool, as the 
man with the IBM 1100 proved.  But it is not sensible to use a tool 
ill suited for the purpose at hand.  I am in the process of writing 
an e-book on using Scribus for book cover design. Book cover design  
is a task for which Scribus is admirably suited.  But the e-book 
publisher insists that the book file size be held to less than two 
megabytes.  If it goes over that parameter I may have to redo it in 
TeX.  I can compress a pdf from Scribus but then I lose anchors etc. 

I am not knocking Scribus. I am putting in a lot of hours on learning 
it.  But all of us need to have more than one arrow in our quiver. 

-- 
John Culleton
Precision Typesetting
Able Indexers and Typesetters
http://wexfordpress.com