[scribus] Scribus-ng Debian/(K)Ubuntu Repositories >> when is it going to switch to 1.5.x ?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:43:52 +0100
Thorsten Rochelmeyer <thr-news at rochelmeyer.com> dijo:

>Am 15.02.2012 17:36, schrieb JLuc:
>> As long as the new table manager is not finished in 1.5,
>> you can export your table to PDF in your usual calc,
>> and import them as PDF in Scribus,
>> in the same way you edit images in gimp and import them in Scribus.

>Thanks for your answer, JLuc. So if the table manager is not yet 
>implemented i might also stick with 1.4 until that happens.

I suffer from the same problem. Most of the work I do (textbooks)
requires frequent tables. 

I rarely use Calc, preferring instead to create the tables in Writer.
They are, after all, just tabular data, not tables where I need to do
fancy calculations. Tables in Writer offer things like merging or
splitting cells, which makes them more useful. 

I can export from Writer to PDF the same as from Calc, but I usually
print to a Postscript file and import that into Scribus. The advantage
is that everything comes in as objects which are editable in Scribus.
The disadvantage is that if you have a lot of these tables it can slow
down screen redraw. 

I also learned to re-think my need for tables. I.e., if tables don't
exist, how can I present the data so it still looks like a table? One
workaround is to convert the table to text in Writer, make sure there
is a tab between each "cell," and then copy and paste into Scribus.
Once the text is in Scribus, define the tabulators for the paragraphs
so the text lines up. This is not useful if I need borders around the
cells, but usually I do not want borders, and I can always use
underlining to create a "border," although it is sometimes difficult to
get an underline precisely the way you want it to look.

Another option is to create the tables with Latex in a Scribus render
frame. Unfortunately, I find the whole TeX family incomprehensible. It
would take me a very long time and a lot of frustration to learn how to
do it. I'd rather just use my workarounds and pray for a quick
implementation of the table manager.