[scribus] Scribus Help

[Don Strayer]

On Thursday, October 07, 2010 02:32:02 pm Julia wrote:
> I am looking for a program that I can use to help me create a catalog
> for print. This catalog in question incorporates both pictures and
> text. It is a catalog to give to prospective buyers, so it has
> pictures/descriptions for every invetory item. A typical catalog
> will contain over 600 invetory items.

Perhaps an example of a catalog done in Scribus would help?

My family holds an annual sale of purebred Black Angus cattle. The sale
catalog must show each animal's name, pedigree, and some additional
related information. The catalog for the most recent sale can be found
here:

http://www.strayerangus.com/documents/saf2010_catalog.pdf

For the first two or three years, I laid out the catalogs in Adobe
PageMaker, but I switched to Scribus as soon as it became available and
never looked back. From the beginning, Scribus was a pleasure to work
with, and it's only gotten better. But in my opinion what really makes
Scribus powerful is its ability to automate part of a layout using
Python scripts.

An online database holds the pedigree information for each animal in
the herd. I save to disk the pedigree web page for each animal we're
selling (so far I haven't been able to automate this step). Then some
rather inelegant Python scripts pick the relevant text out of the saved
HTML, pull a comment for each animal out of another file, and place the
pedigrees on each page.

The remainder of the catalog is done the usual way: Create a text or
image frame; insert content. Repeat.

The ability to automatically pull information from a database and use
it to generate a layout is immensely helpful. It saves days of fiddly
layout work, not to mention the inevitable errors that would otherwise
creep in.

My thanks to the developers of Scribus for giving us such a powerful
tool.

Don Strayer