[scribus] Italics and Scripting

[Henry Hartley]

One of my primary uses of Scribus is to print catalogs of photographs (I'm an amateur photographer). I use the album_letter_2.py script that I modified from Gregory Pittman's original (http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Automatic_import_of_images:_Versions_not_requiring_Tkinter#album_letter_2.py), sometimes with minor changes such as so it starts numbering pages with something other than 1 and I have a few more sets of "images per page" set up. For most of what I do, this is more than adequate and gives me very good reasults.
 
I have recently made a version of that script so that instead of simply importing every image in a directory, and putting them into the document in order by their file names, I provide an array with file names and descriptions so that I can 1) put them in any order I like and 2) print the provided descriptions under the images instead of their file names.

I have two questions:

1) Is there any way I can tag my description text so that I can then make portions of it italic? If I was making those descriptions either all italic or not, I could simply add a third element to my two-dimentional array and then turn italic on or off accordingly but what I want to do is have just a portion of the text italic. An example should help. I have a picture with a description of "Tradescantia virginiana (Virginia Spiderwort)". I'd like the first two words, the Latin name for the plant, to be italic. The rest should be regular. Is there some way I can tag the text ahead of time and then script that style change? I'm guessing not but it would sure save me time. Currently I'm making them italic by hand after importing. It works, of course, but it would be easier if I could get all the text right and then just make the file.

2) The other thing I'd like is to replace the "hard page numbering" that the script provides with tags that get the current page number regardless of where they are. Then, I could insert a page into a document later and the numbering would adjust. This isn't a big deal and I might even remove the page numbers from this particular document completely. Still, I'm curious if a "page number" tag can be put in a scripted document.

Thanks for your help.

-- 
Henry