[scribus] Some questions before beginning with Scribus...

[Gregory Pittman]

On 12/06/2010 09:42 AM, fran.renard at free.fr wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm about to use Scribus to publish a bimonthly magazine.
> In this magazine, they are some articles and some informations.
> Among these informations they are some programs that are extracted
> from a database and should be inserted into the magazine,
> with a nice page layout.
>
> I want to automate the maximum of tasks, and particularly,
> the import and layout of the extracted programs.
>
> Could you tell me if Scribus is adapted for this job,
> and which skills it will need.
>
> I suppose that I'll need some Python scripting,
> and perhaps also some C++ coding (in order to import text) ?
>
> And could you give me some good examples and a list of Python scripts
> and/or C++ packages that would be useful for my job ?
>
> And last, is it best to use the 1.3.3.14 scribus version,
> or the last 1.3.9 one ?

I think you can safely use either. Just use the same version in the 
various OSes you are using.

I would suggest that you consider starting out with creating a template 
for your newsletter, so that you manually figure out a layout which you 
like and can reuse. Learning about Master Pages is good for repetitive 
features like headlines.

Scripting is of course possible, but I think not so likely that you will 
make newsletters from scratch with a script or scripts. We haven't had a 
lot of feedback from anyone who seems to make use of a database for 
content management. There aren't any built-in hooks for databases 
directly from Scribus.

Greg