[scribus] 2 generic questions about Scribus

[Gregory Pittman]

On 02/21/2016 10:27 AM, John L. Poole wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2/21/2016 3:41 AM, JLuc wrote:
>> Le 21/02/2016 08:06, "Christoph Schäfer" a écrit :
>>> - ToC is possible, but it's complicated and simplistic, and Scribus
>>> is not prepared for more complex endeavours, at least not yet.
>> > - Indexing isn't available. You'd have to do it manually.
>>
>> Just a thought :
>> A smart ToC feature should work on a 'project' level
>> = not on a single SLA but on a set of document,
>> because it takes many scribus documents
>> to create a single whole book or magazine.
>>
>> Same for indexes.
>>
>> JLuc
>>
> A thought: since the Scribus format is XML, one interested in developing
> a solution for table of contents and indexing might look to the
> extensible style language transformation ("XSLT") paradigm outside of
> Scribus.  The development in XSLTs for these kinds of tasks is mature
> and might be easily be adapted into Scribus using Saxon.
> 

Funny you should mention this. After I had completed a project with
xml/xslt, I had the same question. This led to this:

http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus_files_as_XML

An issue with transforming XML is that the objects in a Scribus SLA file
occur in the order they are created, so if you have a multipage
document, if you add something to page one as your last edit, it will be
the last object in the SLA file.

What I considered next was making a script that runs inside Scribus and
creates XML, then later an xhtml file from there:

http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus_XML_using_Scripter
http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus_xhtml_using_Scripter

The advantage here is that you can page through the document, capturing
objects on each page as you go. As you can see, there still are a number
of issues to sort out about placement of items in the browser.

Years ago I even wrote Perl scripts to automatically generate SLA files,
so there are many ways to approach the ideas one might have.

Greg