[Scribus] Mail merge?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:43:44 +0100
Pierre Marchand <capparis at free.fr> dijo:

> Vous avez ?crit?:
> > John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > > I don't suppose you can merge text data into Scribus from a database
> > > file, right?

> > If you can generate a simple text file, this script can be modified to
> > do something along those lines:
> > http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Importing_addresses_from_a_text_file
> >
> > Obviously, you're looking for the simplest answer, but hopefully
> > something with some flexibility as well.

> In the same range of ideas I got something usefull in adapting the script 
> proposed here ( http://www.linuxgraphic.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1745 )
> which takes a CSV file as input.
> 
> I put it here : http://www.fontmatrix.net/tmp/etiquettes.py

Thanks to all for the suggestions. I'm no programmer and writing
scripts would take an enormous learning curve that I don't have time
for.

The problem is a database of around 6,000 test questions that reside in
an Access 2000 database. There are 43 other tables in the file, plus
several dozen queries and a few forms. 

I normally use OOo for my word processor and it plays reasonably well
with Scribus. In the past I could merge the questions into a Writer
document dirctly from Access, but someone at OOo noticed that it was
working fine so it needed to be fixed. As a result the merge from
Access no longer works on the Linux versions of OOo. This has sent me
scurrying around trying to find a workaround, hence my query to the
Scribus list. 

I really need a word processor merge because each record (each
question) is several fields (stem, answer A, answer B, etc.) and each
field  needs a different paragraph style applied (different indents,
tabs, etc.). This is trivial for a word processor.

At this point I have discovered Kexi, which I really like. It read the
Access database and imported it perfectly, although the queries and
forms were lost. The data is perfect, however, and the other stuff can
be easily recreated later. OOo is my normal word processor, but it
cannot seem to see the Kexi data (Kex uses sqlite3 format). In fact, I
can't even get KWord to see the data in Kexi (strange!). But I'm making
progress and eventually I'll come up with a way to merge the data into
a word processor, hopefully using Kexi as the database program and OOo
as the word processor. Then it will be simple just to place the text in
Scribus for those occasions when I need its superior layout features.

Thanks again for the suggestions.