[scribus] a new ebook (a.l.e)

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/11/2012 11:15 AM, Meho R. wrote:
> On 06/11/2012 04:35 PM, mir wrote:
>> We recently had to create an ebook from a 430 page book we
>> typeset in Scribus over several months of work.  It was a bit
>> depressing to find out Scribus couldn't export to HTML or any
>> other simple tagged format.  Only to plain text (no markup) or
>> PDF.
>> 
>> We had to export to PDF and from there to epub with Calibre and
>> take it from there with Sigil.  Lots of extra work.
>> 
>> The HTML/XML export feature has been requested ( 
>> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=2974), hopefully some simple 
>> implementation (even without CSS) is done soon.
>> 
>> mir
>> 
> Which is why it's important to prepare document/project (and I mean
> to the final stage, when there's no more work regarding the
> content) in a word processor or even a text editor, from which one
> can create all sorts of outputs. Using Scribus or any other layout
> app in actual developing stage is an overkill in most situations,
> especially when multiple outputs are expected. IMHO, Scribus should
> be *the* final stage of a document preparation process, not one of
> the stages.
> 
> I encountered somehow similar situation with LaTeX; even if there
> is a possibility to export a LaTeX document to HTML, in practice it
> doesn't work very well, especially if you're using a lot of custom
> commands and other sorts of customization.
> 
I think this is a good discussion to have.
Surely if one had great foresight, and was knowledgeable of the
various issues, it would make great sense to carefully plan, assemble
the project in a multipotential way, then efficiently parse it out to
the various end results one wanted.

But people don't always/often/ever have foresight.
They don't anticipate the difficulty of backtracking and redirection.
It may not be their fault -- only after the project is done, then
someone says, "Ok, now let's make an ebook out of this too."

I think we've all had these "Oh, crap!" moments, in which case you
want to figure out what the sortest/quickest/easiest path is to
redesign. In many cases, you may end up with some kind of complete
disassembly of the project, but experience tells us this is complex,
difficult, and fraught with errors and omissions.

>From the Scribus project point of view, we can at least try to offer
some tools which help to cut down the amount of work someone faces,
but I would hope we can also offer some advice other than, "you should
not have done it this way."

Greg