[scribus] A Eureka moment!

[dori.mondon at gmail.com]

That's great. I can't even get the software to start up.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce McIntyre <ooga at shaw.ca>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:41:28 
To: <scribus at lists.scribus.net>
Reply-To: Scribus User Mailing List <scribus at lists.scribus.net>
Subject: [scribus] A Eureka moment!

Lemme tell you about an utterly cool moment with Scribus:

I'm working at a bridge tournament transferring results data to a 
24-page publication overnight.  This is my second time using Scribus to 
do it and I have taken many good suggestions from this forum and a few 
by e-mail (thanks): but the Perl program I have written, to transfer the 
text files produced by the bridge scoring program into nicely tabbed 
text, ready to input into Scribus where I can select styles tailored for 
each type of bridge event, isn't quite working yet--and as a result, the 
old way, editing a text file more or less by hand, at a tournament of 
this size (4 times larger than the one I was at in April!) is eating up 
about 2.5-3 hours a night, almost half the time available.

Two of the five daily issues have appeared, with vast swatches of white 
space in places I simply did not get time to complete before the print 
shop demanded the file.  For the first issue I abandoned printing about 
a dozen photos of winners with time running short and a pre-written 
article seeming to be a faster import.  Going into the third I think I 
have got my Perl program working, and tests on the previous two days of 
files seem to be OK.  I'm alone in a Denny's waiting for food, trying to 
ignore the lack of sleep, looking through the Scribus manual (this being 
the nearest inexpensive restaurant to a huge bridge tournament, you 
always bring something to read because it might be forever!) for tips I 
hadn't thought of.  Almost at random, I come across section 3.10.4.6 on 
page 78, about text filters.  I look through the contents for the 
section on Text Filters (because in 3.10.4.6 you didn't tell me exactly 
where it was!) and read it with great interest, and...

Eureka!  (Food comes and I don't notice.)  In addition to having my 
program set up the tabbed columns, I can also have it add a tag to the 
start of each paragraph based on the type of output it is and the style 
I want to use.  Can it possibly be this simple?

It can!  A quick adjustment to the program and the time saved was up to 
4 hours an issue.  No more selecting paragraphs and choosing a style, 
for 15 pages of results.  On an overnight turnaround, that is money in 
the bank.  An excellent feature, so cool that one would think it was 
made exactly for my purposes -- and one that I never saw in a decade and 
a half of working with Publisher.

Excellent job, guys.  Thanks!

-- 
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|     Bruce  McIntyre     |     email:  ooga at shaw.ca       |
| 9541 Erickson Dr, #1103 | "OO-ga-shaw-ca, OO-ga-shaw-ca" |
|    Burnaby BC CANADA    | Editor -- www.matchpointer.com |
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