[scribus] How to get cool tables in Scribus. Yes!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:43:53 +0200
Christoph Schäfer <christoph-schaefer at gmx.de> dijo:

> > The first thing I discovered is that the table had to be completely
> > reformatted. Pasting into Calc lost all the formatting that I had
> > created in the Writer document. So copying and pasting from Writer is a
> > bad idea.
> 
> Wrong. You lose some formatting, but not all. Most of it is preserved!

In my experience the only thing that was preserved was the font
information. Column and row dimensions became "as needed for the text."
Some of the text in the Writer table was rotated 270 degrees and this
came out 0 degrees. Therefore, "as needed" meant that all the columns
were wrong. The rows were also all different, as the original rows had
been set to specific point sizes to expand the table a bit. Borders
became the default, where the original had been set to 1/2 point.

> > Then I copied and pasted as you suggested into Draw. Sadly, the
> > formatting of text in Calc came out messed up. The messed up part was
> > text that was rotated 270 degrees in the header row. I'm guessing this
> > is an OOo bug. It wasn't badly messed up, but badly enough that it
> > wasn't acceptable.

> Works without issues here. What version of OO.o do you use?

Version 3.0.1 (PPA) on Ubuntu Intrepid. I can't fault your method here,
as I have so many bugs in 3.0.1 that I am sure this is just another one.

> > Why would it occur to me to use Calc?

> To have more options for the design of tables? ;)

Well, I do my writing in OOo Writer. I write the books myself. I sure
don't want to use Calc as a writing tool. Therefore, Writer is the
place I want to create the table. And I've never found a table feature
that I needed that Writer tables did not have. In fact, what features
of tables in Calc do you find that are not also present in Writer?

Backing up several posts ago, there is a problem with placing PS and
EPS vectors into Scribus. See issue 7936. I had that happen only with a
couple of files, but that is enough to make me prefer something more
reliable. I suspect that issue 7936 has something to do with the fact
that the tables in question had a lot of text that used characters from
Unicode blocks 200 and 300. But I need those blocks a lot. And the same
problematic tables worked perfectly if I used Inkscape to convert them
to SVG and place the SVG into Scribus. 

Besides, I don't see a lot of saving in doing the table in Calc,
pasting into Draw, then exporting as EPS. Exporting as PDF, importing
into Inkscape, and saving as SVG takes about the same time.