[scribus] a new ebook

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/13/2012 12:25 PM, Gregory Pittman wrote:
> On 06/13/2012 11:13 AM, Johan Vromans wrote:
>> ale rimoldi <ale.comp_06 at xox.ch> writes:
>> 
>>> hi
>>> 
>>>> Peter Nermander <peter at nermander.se> writes:
>>>> 
>>>>> My fear is that introducing such a feature will increase
>>>>> the amount of requests to adopt Scribus for ebook creation,
>>>>> and that will in turn take developer resources from
>>>>> features that are more important.
>>>> 
>>>> Exactly.
>>> 
>>> please, tell me what i should do instead...
>> 
>> As someone stated in another mail, the primary goal for Scribus
>> is to provide a tool for quality DTP and top notch PDF. There are
>> no other open source tools that can match Scribus.
>> 
> I don't think there is any evidence that this is adversely
> impacting the effort to continue to develop Scribus. Even if we
> wanted to take the tack that "Scribus should do one thing well"
> there are still many decisions about exactly how to do this one
> thing. This ebook plugin may inform us about which particular
> arbitrary decisions might make sense from other perspectives.
> 
Something the wiki offers is a wide open space for those who have
useful information for others to lend some assistance.

It may not be universally acclaimed, but there is clearly a trend
toward multiple outputs for various kinds of publications: print PDF,
web PDF, HTML, and ebooks.

If there is a method by which one can work in Scribus while
considering these other outputs, then we need this sort of
organization described in wiki articles for the benefit of the Scribus
audience. Once we have some sort of plugin, then we may be able to
offer some warnings or advisories about what kind of document this
might be useful for, and some recommendations for other approaches
when it is not likely to help. Maybe a script could be created (a
modification of ExtractText?) which might transform a document to its
elements in a way that could be used by some other program.

I used Sigil for the ebook that started this thread, and there are
still many manual, undocumented things about how to make use of CSS,
as well as how to compensate for the shortcomings of Sigil. One
struggles without some knowledge of xhtml and CSS.

I can imagine that we might come up with a Scribus-to-Sigil method
which would satisfy a variety of specific use cases.

Greg