[scribus] editing table

[John Jason Jordan]

On Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:30:08 -0600
"D. R. Evans" <doc.evans at gmail.com> dijo:

> This is probably another case of my simply not being able to find something
> in the manual.
> 
> I want to change (increase) the number of rows in a table. I looked under
> "Editing Tables" (3.19.2) but that doesn't seem to discuss editing tables
> at all, just editing the cells within a table.
> 
> Naïvely, I expected something obvious in the Properties associated with the
> table, but I couldn't see anything there. Then I tried under Insert,
> thinking that maybe there would be an "Insert Row" capability, but I didn't
> see that either.

The reason it is not in the wiki is because Scribus does not have real
tables, not even in the latest 1.3.5 RC3. When you click to create a
table you are running a script which creates a set of grouped text
frames. 

You could ungroup the frames, then select all of them in one row,
re-group them, copy to the clipboard, and then paste in. Then you'd
have to rearrange the position of the "rows" to accommodate your new
group of tables.

In my experience I find that I can usually do without a table just by
cleverly creating a text frame and setting appropriate tabs in the
paragrph style(s). This works unless I need borders. If I need borders
then I typically create the table in OpenOffice.org Writer, being
careful to mimic the text styles that I am using the Scribus document.
Then I print to file from Writer. In Scribus I use File > Import > Get
Vector File, which imports the file as grouped vector objects. It's not
editable in Scribus because printing to file converts all the text to
outlines. 

A lot of people have been asking for real tables for a long time, but
it is not going to happen for quite a while yet. I can only assume that
the developers have decided it is too complex to tackle right now.