[scribus] Long documents

[Gregory Pittman]

On 12/17/2015 08:40 AM, Feargal Hogan wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have downloaded and installed the latest stable version and am reviewing it as an alternative to ID.
> 
> A few questions:
> 1) Is it suitable for long document production?
> 2) Is the SLA file format documented somewhere?
> 3) Is it possible to import XML format text? I note that html import is supported. Do i need to convert my XML to XHTML rather than import directly? 
> 4) Is there any documentation on supported HTML flavours?
> 

1) Long is a relative thing, of course, but once you get beyond 30 pages
of text, things can slow down. This is a rendering issue for the glyphs.
Typically, the recommendation is to break up your document to smaller
parts, then use some sort of utility to stitch the PDFs together. There
seem to be a number of utilities available for that purpose.

3) XML is not going to work, and even HTML has limitations. It will
mainly handle relatively simple tags such as headings, bold, italic,
paragraph. Don't expect it to handle tabular structures; I'm not sure
about lists, probably not.

4) There is some minimal documentation in the online manual, but it
doesn't say much more than I have above. Importing some test files
should give you more specifics. For example, it should handle <b>, but
does it also handle <strong>?

There is some documentation on the SLA format, hopefully someone else
knows where it is.

Greg