[scribus] Scribus for phone books?

[Matt Hixson]

I'm tentatively looking for a tool that could replace the current 
software we use for paginating our phone books. From what I'm told the 
hardest problem is just flowing the entries around variable sized ads. 
Here's an example of what we produce:

https://www.actionyp.com/prescott,az/a/1/book/

When one of those ads changes or the size of a heading is changed it 
affects how the whole book flows. Is pagination something that Scribus 
does naturally or does even that require some scripting?
  -Matt

On 07/22/2018 11:57 AM, Jurgen Gaeremyn wrote:
> Op 22-07-18 om 10:30 schreef Peter Nermander:
>> It's a matter of what you define as "desktop publishing", at least MS 
>> Word
>> has excellent features for doing catalogs (I have been using them for at
>> least 20-25 years), I assume the same can be done with any program 
>> that has
>> support for printing custom designed address labels.
>>
>> But a better solution might be to just use the database application and a
>> suitable "report generator". Then what you need to design is just the
>> template for the report generator. I have been doing this with MS Access
>> for 20-25 years too.
>>
>> (My use of MS Office is at work, where I have no control of what software
>> is installed, privately I prefer to tro to use FOSS as much as possible.)
>>
> I kind of agree with both sides... Scribus is a great tool for 
> processing the layout of virtually anything. But you need to have the 
> text prepped for the process. If this is a big and recurring project, it 
> might be worth the effort to tweak the scripting to have it working. If 
> it's a smaller project or only a one-off project, you would be better 
> off with something like LibreOffice (or MS Office if that's your 
> horsehouse). It will have easier solutions to quickly generate output - 
> but will miss out on details like professional grade kerning or high 
> quality PDF documents.
> 
> So basically it's up to you... Scribus is a great tool in the Linux 
> philosophy: do one thing and do it great + work together with other 
> great tools for added functionality.
> 
> All the best,
> Jurgen Gaeremyn
> 
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