[scribus] need help importing an odt file

[ZASKE Martin]

Doing a book of some 100+ pages.

Created linked text frames with the new document features in Scribus.
Those work fine.

I am running Scribus 1.5.5 on a Windows 10 pro machine. RAM is 16 GB and
Scribus is fine with the amount of text and pages.



My odt file is from LibreOffice Writer Version: 6.4.6.2 (x64).

I got a lot of text, but nothing fancy:

- no index, no illustrations, no footnotes

- only two paragraph styles: headings and main text

- only one character style: italics for emphasis, mostly inside main text

I carefully follow the instructions from Scribus Help "Importing
OpenOffice.org Writer and OpenDocument files"

In fact I had used a commercial text editor, which also does odt files.
But I migrated my text on purpose to LibreOffice, hoping to get a better
importing experience in Scribus.

Possibly the "migration" from Textmaker 2018 to LibreOffice has created
a "bad" file. But everything looks and prints perfect in LibreOffice. Do
you know working tools to validate or fix odt files?



For my import so far I use those settings on the first part of book,
only some 65 pages (tried some others too but those did not work at all):

importer: OpenOffice.org writer documents

encoding UTF-8

prefix styles with doc name

tick overwrite paragraph styles

untick merge paragraph styles

tick use document name as prefix

untick do not ask again



The import runs for a rather long time (minutes) and my processors and
disk are not really working at 100%, only some bursts on the cores; then
it finishes without errors but I get unexpected results:

I would expect my three styles (as listed above) to show up as imports
and to be properly assigned to their respective parts of my file. The
two paragraph styles get imported, but are not properly assigned. The
character style is lost completely.

I also see from the import a list of "new styles" named P1 to P31 where
the importer obviously failed to keep the link between the real styles
and the concerned portions of text.


I am still heavily going through formatting options (type faces,
margins) in loops with the client, so I will need to import several more
times, but I do not want to manually keep tweaking dozens of dummy-styles.



Just to be thorough, I did save to HTML from LibreOffice and imported
that file into my Scribus text frames:

- No dummy styles this time.

- The headings worked as expected.
- The main text paragraph style was lost or assigned to default

- the character style for emphasis was lost entirely

So again, an import which would mean hours of fixing.





Please advise if there are known issues with certain Libre Office or
Scribus versions or with the encoding or with the options for my import.
Or maybe I am doing it all wrongly - please show me the way.

I rarely do books of this size in Scribus and time is also running out
because of an overseas-move. So all help and input muchly appreciated.

Thanks and greetings.











-- 
ZASKE Martin
responsable GʊGʊ
BP 50 - Bassila - Bénin
tel GʊGʊ 66.66.11.11
tel pers 97.44.62.95