[scribus] Get the width of a piece of text in a Scribus script?

[John Culleton]

On Fri, 09 Aug 2013 15:43:52 -0700
Adam <adam at photosynth.ca> wrote:

> Good day,
> I'm working on a script for laying out a song
> book that includes lyrics and chords. Chord
> names need to be placed above each line of
> lyrics, at the appropriate spot in the lyrics.
> I've explored a variety of approaches to this
> using typographic options to try to get the
> chord letters bumped up above the lyrics line
> using baseline shift and kerning adjustments,
> but so far these have not proved effective.
> 
> My present approach is to put each chord in a
> small text box above the lyrics line. In order
> to do this, I need to be able to determine the
> horizontal position of that point in the
> lyrics, as rendered in the relevant font and
> type size. Does anyone know of a way to do this?
> 
> Apparently the ImageFont python module (which
> is a subset of PIL, or the Python Imaging
> Library), can return the width of a text line
> as rendered, but I so far have not been able to
> get this module working properly (there's a C
> library involved, which is malfunctioning in my
> installation).
> 
> Does anyone know of any other way to
> programatically measure the rendered width of a
> line of text?
> 
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> Adam
>
There are horses for courses, as my father use to
say. Consider laying out the songs using the free
program Mup. Each output will be a postscript file
that you can import into Scribus. There is some
learning involved of course but you will find
that the alignment of notes to verses is elegantly
handled. You can also output midi files to
play the music.


-- 

John Culleton
Wexford Press
410-795-1159