[Scribus] How to place text in a box

[Chris Bergstresser]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 7:56 AM, John Beardmore <John at t4sltd.co.uk> wrote:
>  >    You know, I'm going to say any typographic convention in common
>  > usage in Victorian times counts as a "basic typesetting function".
>
>  It may have been common, (quantify ?), but that doesn't mean that it's a
>  'primitive', or 'basic to', modern type setting practice or algorithms.

   Sadly, the British Library's archive isn't publicly accessible,
which would be the best resource for this sort of thing.  But I'm
browsing through the online Brooklyn Daily Eagle for December 1, 1902,
and in 20 pages I've found maybe a dozen examples of what I'm talking
about -- text set apart in boxes (decorative and otherwise) that needs
to flow with the text both before and after it.  And that's not
counting the dozens of tables, which suffer from the same problem.
   Note that I'm *not* referring to the title inset in the upper
border; that's also something I'd like but without the ability to have
boxes that flow it's kind of moot.

>  More to the point, if I pulled a hundred books off my shelves, I dount
>  more than 1% would use text in a box in quite the way you describe.

   I'll certainly agree it's not as common in typesetting books
(although more common in modern books than before).

>  ... the feature you are requesting could be implemented in
>  vast number of styles, or alternatively have highly configurable style.
>
>  That either means that a less general purpose, but more specific to your
>  needs, tool is produced...
>  ...or that the type of feature you want is added in a highly
>  configurable way, in which case it needs a lot of user interface, and
>  becomes a voluminous task, even if not algorithmically challenging.

   I don't disagree, if you wanted to do it *right* you'd have to
allow things like decorative spacers, individually configurable sides
(show borders on all but the right side), specify if borders should
appear between paragraphs as well, set the inset margin for each
border separately, specify if you want text to appear over the borders
and the style of that text if you do, etc, etc, etc ...  Word has a
serviceable interface for about half of this, and Illustrator has a
serviceable interface for roughly the other half.
   But really, just allowing you to draw a line border around a given
paragraph style, and specify the line weight, is most of what you
need.  I also kind of need the inset font on the top border, and
that'd be a nice feature as well, but I'll concede it's an
idiosyncratic need.

>  I guess you could submit a feature request, but as you think it "doesn't
>  seem like a specially difficult", and the source is open, why not have a
>  go ?

   Because I program Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and a
slew of statistical languages.  Also Pascal and Visual Basic, if those
count.  But I *don't* program C++.  I literally wouldn't know where to
start.

-- Chris