[scribus] External manipulation of a Scribus template

[Aleksander Kujbida]

I like a.I.e's perspective (because it's mine too!), but I don't know how
much demand there might be. If you look at how much COM programming is
happening to build MS Office documents via web interfaces, I would suggest
that it is at least investigating.

I have realized that the source files of Scribus docs are just XML, and so
any program can create and manipulate Scribus docs: this is trivial (in
concept; the practice can be a fair bit of effort, as we can see with
products like PHPWord). Like many others, I programmatically edit MS Word
and MS Excel XML files regularly.

The missing link in this approach is printing: ultimately, nobody wants a
Scribus file, they want a PDF or hardcopy, or whatever (same is true for
Word, AutoCAD, etc). Any script or program can create a Scribus doc, or
more likely case edit a template, but only Scribus knows how to convert the
file into something viewable.

The BIG question: Can Scribus to read a Scribus document and output a PDF
(say), without having to open Scribus into a GUI?

Regards

On 22 June 2012 11:15, a.l.e <ale.comp_06 at xox.ch> wrote:

> hi
>
>  <<
>> Ideally, they would enter the text for named portions of the document
>> in a web interface (they do know how to surf), and we would have a
>> backend that stuffs these into the correct slots in a template. But I
>> do not see anything on this in the documentation.
>> >>
>>
>> depends on your needs, but most I've come across like this still needed
>> an editor to make the document "presentable".
>> In that respect it would not be too much more effort for the editor to
>> "Get Text" from the contributors having emailed text or odt files
>> (especially if they were named according to the named portion)?
>>
>> If you do have a lot of "named portions" then yes presumably it could be
>> scripted relatively easily, like an expanded mail merge process. But
>> obviously you would need to have some "rules" by which the contributors and
>> scripts can live by.
>>
>
> despite everybody telling him that he should do it manually -- and
> probably creating the content before working with scribus -- what he wants
> to do is probably fine and doable with scribus and some python scripting.
>
> and i'm pretty sure that this something people will want to do more and
> more!
>
> personally, i'm currently focused on usability and productivity with
> scribus 1.5svn... and it's coming along very well... but once this is done,
> i'd really like to work a bit on getting scribus to work with some external
> interfaces (as an example a web application, like  he is asking!)
>
> there are some solution that are currently more mature for such a task
> (xml to pdf, latex, ...), but scribus should imo become a tool that
> supports distributed workflows
>
> have fun
> a.l.e
>
>
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