[scribus] Opening MS Publisher files

[John Culleton]

On Saturday 07 August 2010 06:27:21 Trevor Jenkins wrote:
> The problem with exporting the file to Postscript is that the text
> structure has gone. All one is left with are instruction of how to make
> marks on a display surface (be that screen or paper). Postscript is
> essentially a final-form version of the document. My requirement is to
> extract the text and markup from a Publisher and import it into Scribus (or
> any one of dozen text analysis tools) for further processing.


Reminds me of the story of the tourist and the Vermont farmer. The tourist 
asked for directions to St. Johnsbury. The farmer made several attempts at 
sketching out a route and finally replied: "Mister, if I wanted to go to  St. 
Johnsbury I sure wouldn't start from here."

It is easy to load a pdf file into Acroread or Okular (for Linux) and then save 
it as text. That is probably as far as you will get. If you could save the file 
as rtf or .doc then of course many possibilities open up.

The other possibility is to input the file as pdf or ps into Scribus from the 
file menu. Then each page is a picture. I have had varying success with this 
feature in 1.5.0. It helps if each page is a separate file.  You can view it 
and break it into items but of course the text is not accessible.


-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
"Create Book Covers with Scribus"
Printable E-book 38 pages $5.95
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html