[scribus] Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) PlugIn, Adobe InDesign

[Steve Herrick]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 1:15 PM, avox <avox at arcor.de> wrote:

> The Scribus fileformat is due for a complete overhaul anyway.

I thought we were in the middle of that right now.

> What were the details of your idea?

Well, I'm not a programmer, so it was all a bit fuzzy. :)

My idea is to allow *any* XML
> and use the CSS 'display' and 'class' attributes to provide links
> to Scribus's style system. On first import, Scribus could synthesize
> Scribus-styles from existing CSS formatting.

Well, *any* XML would encompass ODF and HTML, and I hope we can lump
in plain text, too. My thinking was that Scribus would simply replace
the existing characteristics, or better still, support them natively.
I assume all CSS would have to be inline, to allow fine-grained
control. Stylesheets would still exist, but to supply CSS that would
be pasted into inline tags.

> When saving, Scribus would use the 'class' attribute to point to a Scribus
> style. The 'display' attribute would control if that is a paragraph style,
> char style or other.

I'm not sure why you'd need that. What's wrong with simply having a
paragraph tag, an object tag, and a character tag?

Direct formatting would be translated to CSS attributes
> or to a limited set of Scribus specific custom attributes.
> Unknown attributes would be preserved by Scribus. Element names would be
> meaningless to Scribus, since anything Scribus needs to know will be in the
> attributes.

Sounds good.

Another thought just occurred to me: SVG is also XML. It makes my head
hurt to think about applying CSS to SVG, though I can't think of any
technical reason you wouldn't be able to. Anyway, I think that as long
as we're using XML natively, we could start to blur the line between
Scribus and Inkscape.

-- 
Steve Herrick

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.
- Hobbes the tiger