[Scribus] scribus and openoffice

[Gregory Pittman]

Chantal Rosmuller wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> One my customers publishes books. We are plannign to migrate to openoffice and 
> eventually to Linux desktops. 
> Writing, editing and layout are all done in Microsoft Word. At the moment a 
> pretty complex template is used to make sure the layout is maintained.
> We have already established that it is impossible to build a template with the 
> same functionality for Openoffice. This is not a really big problem because 
> the template is not 100% user friendly, but an alternative solution is needed 
> before we can migrate to openoffice.
>
> And yes I know it is possible to use Microsoft Office in a Linux environment, 
> but then we need a licence for crossover office and we will in time have to 
> spend a lot of money for an office upgrade.
> So it would be nice if this can be avoided.
>
> The person in charge of publishing has already worked with Scribus (more 
> information in the previous post) and she likes it. Scribus is however too 
> complicated for the writers, translaters and editors.
> finishing a book in openoffice and the simply import it into Scribus is not a 
> solution because of the workflow. Writing, editing and layouting are not 
> done "one after the other" but can occur at the same time.
>
> We are looking for a way to connect the data between the Writer document and 
> the Scribus document, or maybe a script or program that is able to translate 
> the Openoffice document to Scribus in combination with a simple writer 
> template? An extra complexity is that a lot of translaters work from home, 
> they may not be willing to use a Openoffice, lthough it is my personal 
> opionion that that is not a really great sacrifice because it's free. Someone  
> has told me that it is possible to install a small plugin for MS Office, with 
> this plugin it is possible to read documents in the open document format and 
> also use Openoffice templates. That may be an interesting alternative.  
>   
if you look here:
http://documentation.scribus.net/index.php/Working_With_Text#ODT_Import_Example
you should see that using Writer should be a far better choice than 
Word, since you can import styles from Writer, whereas with Word, even 
with antiword installed, you only get plain text.

Greg