[scribus] First working version of a QuarkXPress Tag import filter in Scribus ready for testing

["Christoph Schäfer"]

Hi all,


As of yesterday night, Scribus 1.5.1svn finally provides a working import filter for XTG files (QuarkXPress Tags), i.e., plain text files with formatting instructions. Until then, the XTG filter's main achievement was to not crash Scribus and to import the files as plain text, without parsing the formatting tags ;)


For those who regularly build bleeding edge Scribus, it's not perfect yet but it already works very well, provided you don't use OpenType ligatures in XPress. It nevertheless needs serious testing, though.


To test the import of XTGs into 1.5.1svn text frames, you obviously need to compile the latest version of Scribus trunk. Once built, XTG files can be imported into text frames just like ODT or RTF files.


If you happen to have access to either QuarkXPress, or another software that can export XTG files (there are many export mechanisms available for databases), or some legacy files, we'd be grateful if you could upload them to http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11311, provided you don't violate anyone's copyrights in the content of the XTGs. Please note that Quark only added UniCode support in version 7 of XPress, so it would be interesting to test non-Unicode files from different platforms and earlier XPress versions. Moreover, we've been able to test XTG files from versions 4 to 2015. If anyone has a copy of XPress v. 1 to 3, as well as a VM for ancient operating systems at hand, it would help us to cover XTG from its inception to the present.



Happy testing!


Christoph