[scribus] External manipulation of a Scribus template

[a.l.e]

hi aleksander
> Quite right, a.l.e., adventurous! 'Headless', that's the word I was looking
> for. I've been messing with Scribus since we hired some graphics people to
> straighten out our presentation mess, and very much like the control we get
> with page layout software. Scribus let's us implement the designer's design
> very well. MS Word is rubbish for this, and our users would continually be
> make changes driven by personal preference and accident.
>
> We will have to either try to find a head/headless page layout package that
> let's us wysiwig a template then programatically edit its contents, or
> stumble through with available technology, most likely getting someone to
> make the docs manually.
>

then just create the layout with scribus, produce a pdf, optimize its 
size and use the created pdf as a background for the PDFs generated by 
your php or python classes!
as said, easy to do with PHP and fpdf/fpdi or other similar libraries.


on the other side, if you have somebody pulling in the text "manually" 
scribus will be ok:
- you open your template
- launch the script
- get the script to show the datasets available (and ready) on the server
- let the script pull the correct dataset and fill your frames with it
- produce the pdf

i don't think that it's public, yet (so i can't link it in here), but i 
can show you the schedule i've helped producing for this years the 
rencontres mondiales du logiciel libre (http://rmll.info):
- the user clicks on the first frame of a chain (in this case!)
- he runs the script which pulls in the data which as been exported from 
the server as csv
- tweaks the layout
- produces the pdf
(the script is only producing the part with the list of all conferences! 
the rest is the graphics designer's work)
i can send you the resulting pdf, tomorrow if you want to seeit.

it is possible (and not that difficult) to create a script that pulls 
directly the information from a website and places different parts in 
different frames (you just have to match the fields on the weboutput and 
the frames in the scribus pages).

this is something which is doable with scribus now. without any hacks!

but, again, all depends on what you want to do... and we still know 
nothing about it!

ciao
a.l.e