[scribus] Bulk Image Path modification / Relative Image Paths

[john Culleton]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:49:37 +0200
Martin Kempf <baubiologie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I just cleaned up my HD, and changed the absolute paths of my scribus 
> files and image folders on my main working HD.
> Now, of course, I have to change image per image the path inside my 
> nearly hundred scribus files...
> I'm using 1.3.3.14 portable on Win7
> 
> Is there any way to bulk change all paths inside a scribus document?
> Or if I could just click inside of the path-text in the image manager 
> and copie-past the new path...
> 
> And, which would make the future file manipulations much easier, is 
> there any way to put the image path in a relative way? for example
> all images in a sub-folder, pointed like "../Images/" or somehow, and
> I could find my images once the whole  docs folder structure placed 
> elsewhere...
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Martin
> 

On my Linux system I have a subfolder:

/usr/local/active

And each project has its own folder within active:

/usr/local/active/grammar

for a typesetting and indexing project for an academic with the last
name of Grammar (sic). 

Within each project folder are all the pertinent files, including
graphics, source and pdf. If things get too crowded I may have yet
another subfolder for the graphics, e.g.:

/usr/local/active/grammar/illos



I recognize that fiddling with folder structures is more automatic to
Linux users than it is to Windows users. But the same mechanisms exist.

As for bulk changes within a Scribus .sla file this also is easy for
me. I am used to editing plain text documents in Gvim. Again this may
not be as common in the Windows world. Gvim has a change statement like:

:% s/\\myfolder\\foo/\\myfolder\\foo\\bar/g

this string translates into 

: do a command
% apply it to all lines
s substitute
/ / / the from-to string dividers
\\myfolder = \myfolder
\\foo = \foo
\\bar = \bar
g apply it to all instances in a line (i.e. globally)

The g is necessary because Scribus sla files tend to run many
statements together without intervening end-of-line characters. Now the
above command looks very complicated to the first time user but to the
experienced Gvim user it is automatic. I have used similar substitution
strings literally thousands of times in the past two decades.

Another popular text editor is Emacs. 

The default text editor Notepad that comes with Windows is very limited
and tends to blow up on big files etc. So I suggest to all users that
they learn a more capable editor. Vim/Gvim is free as is Emacs.

John Culleton