[scribus] editing table

[John Beardmore]

John Culleton wrote:
> On Saturday 25 July 2009 08:34:15 pm John Beardmore wrote:
>> John Jason Jordan wrote:

>>> ...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.
>> What sort of file do you print to from OO ?
>>
>>> 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.
>> Which is a serious PITA for those of us doing any kind of
>> technical work !
> 
> Decades ago programming guru Grace Hopper cautioned against using 
> FORTRAN for COBOL tasks and vice versa.

:)  And he may have been half right depending on how he defined FORTRAN 
and COBOL tasks.


> At its current incarnation 
> Scribus is excellent for  book covers,  ad copy, flyers, and 
> newsletters.  It doesn't yet measure up for technical works with 
> lots of tables, footnotes and the like.  And long works are a 
> challenge for Scribus.

I wouldn't use it to prepare the RS Catalogue, but it's good for a lot 
more than newsletters.

For what it's worth, I don't find it any worse for 50 to 100 page works 
than Pagemaker and InDesign used to be.


>  I suppose that with 1.3.5 or later one 
> could call on one of several table macro sets that are available 
> with TeX (I like the Texsys table macros) but then the problem of 
> future correction still exists.  It is both easier and more 
> satisfactory to do that book entirely in TeX, either pdftex plus 
> eplain, Context, or pdflatex (in decreasing order of my 
> preference.)

Yes.


> The future looks bright. But there are limitations on the present. 

Indeed !


Cheers, J/.
-- 
John Beardmore, MSc EDM (Open), B.A. Chem (Oxon), CMIOSH, AIEMA, MEI
Managing Director, T4 Sustainability Limited. http://www.T4sLtd.co.uk/
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