r15777 by christoph - rewritten importhints2.html
scribus-commit
scribus-commit at lists.scribus.net
Sat Nov 6 03:20:02 CET 2010
Author: christoph
Date: Sat Nov 6 02:20:02 2010
New Revision: 15777
URL: http://scribus.info/websvn/listing.php?repname=Scribus&sc=1&rev=15777
Log:
rewritten importhints2.html
Added:
branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/images/vectimp1.png (with props)
branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/images/vectimp2.png (with props)
branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/images/vectimp3.png (with props)
branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/images/vectimp4.png (with props)
branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/images/vectimp5.png (with props)
Modified:
branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints1.html
branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints2.html
Modified: branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints1.html
URL: http://scribus.info/websvn/diff.php?repname=Scribus&rev=15777&path=/branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints1.html
==============================================================================
--- branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints1.html (original)
+++ branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints1.html Sat Nov 6 02:20:02 2010
@@ -1,10 +1,25 @@
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
- <title>Notes on Importing EPS/PS into Scribus</title>
+ <title>Importing EPS</title>
</head>
<body>
-<h2>Notes on Importing EPS/PS into Scribus</h2>
+<h2>Importing EPS</h2>
+<h3>What is EPS?</h3>
+
+<h3>Why EPS?</h3>
+
+<h3>EPS Import</h3>
+
+<h4>EPS Previews</h4>
+
+<h4>Importing into an image frame</h4>
+
+<h4>Importing as a vector drawing</h4>
+
+<h4>Caveats</h4>
+
+<h3>Special EPS files</h3>
<p>To better your chances of successfully importing EPS/PS files it helps to have three ingredients:</p>
<ul>
Modified: branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints2.html
URL: http://scribus.info/websvn/diff.php?repname=Scribus&rev=15777&path=/branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints2.html
==============================================================================
--- branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints2.html (original)
+++ branches/Version135/Scribus/scribus/doc/en/importhints2.html Sat Nov 6 02:20:02 2010
@@ -1,33 +1,66 @@
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
- <title>Advanced Importing Tricks with Scribus</title>
+ <title>Importing Vector Drawings</title>
</head>
<body>
-<h2>Advanced Importing Tricks with Scribus</h2>
-<p>As I said in the previous page, one of the more difficult tasks in DTP is getting stuff <em>into</em> your layout. Below are some hints I developed while working with the new SVG importer. Among the reasons I like SVG import is: Scribus can edit it and it can be color managed very easily. It is compact and the resultant PDFs are also small. Imported SVGs print superbly.</p>
-<p>Background: I had agreed to give a presentation to a local tech group made up of mostly MS based web developers. My topic was PDF and the web. My aim was to show where PDF files could be integrated into web content. I had decided I wanted to show off Scribus and the power of open source web development tools to these folks via a "presentation" PDF.</p>
-<p>A couple of problems came up immediately:</p>
-<ol>
- <li>It was going to be done via a nice sharp presentation screen, so quality mattered.</li>
- <li>I had lots of different files which needed to get integrated into the presentation.</li>
-</ol>
-<p>Issue - Getting the Scribus logo into SVG. I wanted to have the Scribus, as well as the group's logo in SVG, so I could scale it up big - like 6+ feet (2 meters). Here is how I did it:</p>
+<h2>Importing Vector Drawings</h2>
+<h3>Supported formats</h3>
+<p>Here’s a short description of the vector formats currently supported by Scribus:</p>
+<ul>
+<li><b>AI (Adobe Illustrator)</b>: The native format of Illustrator, or, more precisely, formats. Older versions of AI are basically EPS files that contain some additional features only used by Illustrator. As of Illustrator 9, AI is based on PDF, and, like its predecessor, adds some Illustrator-only information. AI import is still experimental but works very well in most cases. One of the major advantages of the AI import filter (and the EPS filter as well) is that Scribus will load spot colors in AI and EPS files correctly. If PDF-based AI files are opened directly (via <i>File > Open</i>), Scribus will also import AI/PDF layers.</li>
+<li><b>EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)</b>: Probably the most wide-spread graphics format in pre-press and a subset of the PostScript standard. See the section about <a href="importhints1.html">EPS import</a> for more information.</li>
+<li><b>PS (PostScript)</b>: A page description language created by Adobe Systems and the foundation of almost all modern print workflows. The PDF format is also derived from PostScript. Since PostScript files can contain more than one page, import may not deliver the expected result.</li>
+<li><b>FIG (Xfig)</b>: This is the native format of the UNIX drawing veteran Xfig. While rarely used by designers, it’s ubiquitous in scientific environments like universities for technical drawings or diagrams. The format is well-documented, and import into Scribus works flawlessly.</li>
+<li><b>Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)</b>: An open and widely used standard for two-dimensional vector graphics. See the section about <a href="scribus-svg.html">SVG import</a> for more information.</li>
+<li><b>SXD (OpenOffice.org Draw 1) and ODG (OpenDocument Graphics)</b>: These are the vector file formats used by OpenOffice.org and other Open Source Office Suites. Since “Office Drawing” is quite different from working with a typical vector drawing program, the formats use a lot of features, like automatic connectors, that aren’t well-suited for a print workflow. As a result, import will only work with limited success. See <a href="importhints3.html">Scribus and OpenOffice.org/OpenDocument</a> for possible workarounds.</li>
+<li><b>WMF (Windows Metafile)</b>: A vector format used by many Office Suites and also the Windows clipboard. While WMF files are usually rejected by creative professionals, most collections of “Office Clipart” use this format. The WMF filter has been added to enable users to import these simple vector drawings.</li>
+<li><b>PICT (Macintosh Picture)</b>: The graphics file format used by Mac OS, similar to WMF on Windows. It can contain bitmap or vector data.</li>
+<li><b>CVG (Calamus Vector Graphic)</b>: A simple vector format used by the DTP veteran Calamus. It only supports grayscale colors.</li>
+<li><b>SHAPE (Dia Shapes) and SML (Kivio Shape)</b>: Basic vector shapes used by the diagram programs Dia and Kivio. Grayscale/RGB only.</li>
+</ul>
+<h3>How it works</h3>
+<p>Importing vector drawings into Scribus is rather different if compared to most other DTP programs, and it’s also an exception to the “frame paradigm” used for almost everything else in Scribus.</p>
+<p>When you import a vector drawing via <i>File > Import > Get Vector File</i>, the vector data of the original file will be converted into native Scribus vector objects. The major advantage of this approach is that imported vector graphics remain fully editable in Scribus, which is useful even if you don’t intend to use Scribus as a vector editor. For example, the conformance to published specifications like EPS or SVG can vary enormously between programs or different versions of the same program. Importing files as native vector objects allows for easy and quick corrections like closing paths etc. It also enables Scribus to easily change or modify the colors of imported vector graphics (see below).</p>
+<p>The Scribus approach to vector import comes at a cost, though, and you need to consider carefully whether you are willing to pay this price or rather export your drawing as a bitmap image and import it into an <a href="WwImages.html">image frame</a>. First, as you will notice when you try to load a complex vector file, importing can take very long, as Scribus may have to create hundreds or even thousands of Scribus vector objects. Moreover, the creation of that amount of objects also results in an Undo/Redo event for each object. You can speed up import a little bit by disabling Undo/Redo before you import a complex drawing. Likewise, scaling or moving a complex drawing means changing the properties of all objects within this drawing, and if you don’t have enough memory on your computer, Scribus may even crash.</p>
+<p>A similar problem may be the number of colors in your <a href="color1.html">color list</a>. Since Scribus imports the colors of all objects in a drawing (see below), you may end up with a seemingly endless list of colors. Again, you need to decide whether you need the advantages of this approach.</p>
+<p>Finally, every drawing that consists of more than one vector object (i.e., almost every drawing) is imported as a <i>group</i> of objects, and text flow around groups doesn’t work. This means you have to draw a separate <a href="WwShapes.html">shape</a> around the drawing to let text flow around it.</p>
+<h3>Editing imported vector drawings</h3>
+<p>Working with the built-in vector tools is described in <a href="EditingShapes.html">Editing Shapes</a>. But as you will notice after importing a vector drawing, the tools are not availabe immediately, the reason being the import of a drawing as a <i>group</i> of vector objects. Thus, you need to <i>ungroup</i> the graphic first. This can be achieved via the “Ungroup” command in the “Item” menu, the Context Menu of the drawing or by using the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+G:</p><br>
+<table width="100%"><tr><td align="center"><img src="images/vectimp1.png" title="The “Ungroup” command" alt="The “Ungroup” command" /></td></tr></table><br>
+<p>The more complex an imported drawing, the more likely the necessity to apply “Ungroup” several times, as the drawing will probably consist of many sub-groups.</p>
+<p>The drawback of this approach is that it decomposes the whole drawing, even if you only want to edit a small part of it. If you later want to move or resize the whole graphic, you have to regroup all parts again. Fortunately, Scribus comes with a powerful tool that comes to the rescue in this situation, namely the Document Outline (<i>Windows > Outline</i>). This dialog lists all elements in a Scribus document, sorted per page. Here you can select single parts of the imported group, and if you’re lucky, the creator of the drawing assigned meaningful names to the respective elements, although not all programs and file formats provide this feature. Scribus will jump to each selected element and indicate the selection by showing the frame border of the item in red:</p>
+<table width="100%"><tr><td align="center"><img src="images/vectimp2.png" title="Using the Document Outline to select items in grouped objects" alt="Using the Document Outline to select items in grouped objects" /></td></tr></table><br>
+<p>You can now use the Context Menu in the Document Outline to detach the selected item from the rest of the group by using the “Ungroup” command. As described above, you may have to use the command several times, depending on how deeply nested the groups in the drawing are. At the end of the process, you can see the item as a separate entry in the Document Outline:</p><br>
+<table width="100%">
+ <tbody>
+ <tr>
+ <td align="center"><img src="images/vectimp4.png" title="The item “path13122” has been detached from the group “svg1061”, an imported SVG file." alt="The item “path13122” has been detached from the group “svg1061”, an imported SVG file." /></td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td><div align="center"><i>The item “path13122” has been detached from the group “svg1061”, an imported SVG file."</i></div></td>
+ </tr>
+ </tbody>
+</table>
-<p>Franz had the original logo as an EPS, thankfully. However, part of the logo in the EPS was a bitmap. The secret weapon was <code>pstoedit</code>, a command line tool which can converts bitmaps EPS and PS files into all kinds of different vector formats. When installed correctly, you can use this as kind of a plug-in to GSview.</p>
-<p>Open Scribus EPS logo file in GSview. Go Edit > Convert to Vector and this dialog pops up:</p>
+<h3>Solid colors in imported vector drawings</h3>
+<p>A consequence of the way Scribus imports vector files is that all colors in a drawing will be added the list of available colors. Depending on the complexity of a drawing and the number of imported files, the list can become quite long, and depending on the source format and the used color spaces, the color names may not be very meaningful:</p>
+<table width="100%"><tr><td align="center"><img src="images/vectimp3.png" title="Imported colors from a vector drawing (SVG)" alt="Imported colors from a vector drawing (SVG)" /></td></tr></table><br>
+<p>This may initially be confusing to some users, but there are ways to make life easier for you. First of all, Scribus does not duplicate colors, i.e., if an imported drawing uses a color whose color values match those of an already existing color, the imported color will be “mapped” to the list of colors. This works even with spot colors. Second, Scribus supports <a href="color1.html">named colors</a>, so if a vector program and the file format can save color names, those will be imported:</p><br>
+<table width="100%">
+ <tbody>
+ <tr>
+ <td align="center"><img src="images/vectimp5.png" title="Xfig uses a name for every color, and Scribus will import the named colors." alt="Xfig uses a name for every color, and Scribus will import the named colors." /></td>
+ </tr>
+ <tr>
+ <td><div align="center"><i>Xfig uses a name for every color, and Scribus will import the named colors.</i></div></td>
+ </tr>
+ </tbody>
+</table>
+<br>
+<p>If you delete an imported drawing, its colors won’t disappear from the color list automatically, as it’s difficult to determine whether they have been “mapped” or are being used by other objects. This is not a problem, because after deleting the drawing, you can open the color manager (<i>Edit > Colors</i>) and click “Remove Unused”, which will remove all colors that aren’t used by any item in your document.</p>
+<p>An example for the usefulness of the color import is the “Replace Colors” feature. Imagine you are working with a vector logo that is supposed to appear in different colors in different documents. By using “Replace Colors”, you can work with one single source file. Import the logo into your document and replace one or more logo colors just as your specific document requires. And speaking of logos: These are often required to use a spot color. If you created or edited the logo in a program that doesn’t support spot colors, you can load the graphic into Scribus and use “Replace Colors” to replace a CMYK or RGB color with a spot color:</p><br>
+<table width="100%"><tr><td align="center"><img src="images/new5.png" title="Replacing colors" alt="Replacing colors"/></td></tr></table><br>
-<table width="100%"><tr><td align="center"><img src="images/pstoedit1.png" alt="pstoedit"/></td></tr></table><br />
-
-<p>Looking down the long list of export file formats, which is impressive, I found Sketch, which can export SVG. So I selected that and checked <strong>Text to polygons</strong>. Why? SVG text handling is tricky and not completely finished in Sketch or Sodipodi. Then, GSview blinked a blank screen and then I had a .sk or Sketch file. I opened this in Sketch and all looked well, so export SVG from Sketch then import Scribus. Perfect. No, not yet. Some of the elements did not export quite as expected and would not appear in the SVG. (At this point the SVG importer was a week old, so I chalked it up to bugs or missing features, but later I found this was <strong>not</strong> the case. Scribus does fine job importing <em>well-formed</em> SVG.)</p>
-<p> So, on a hunch I opened up the same SVG in Sodipodi and re-saved. Then re-import, better but not perfect. Then in Sodipodi, I realized there is an option to <strong>Save as Plain SVG</strong>. OK, we are almost home. I could clearly see the elements in the group, but a few were blank. So, in Scribus, I un-grouped all the elements in the imported SVG and selected the blank ones. Interestingly, I found in the drawing editor palette, some of the paths were not yet closed. Click on the close path and voila, the colors appeared. A few minutes of clicking and closing paths and I had the Scribus logo in Scribus, as SVG. Mission accomplished.</p>
-
-<p>I used the same trick to import tables in a PDF into Scribus. One of the Scribus users on the list was trying to use Scribus in place of InDesign. In testing, one of the issues was the lack of table support in Scribus and InDesign does have good support for tables. So, again pstoedit, Sketch and Sodipodi came to the rescue.</p>
-<p>I got the InDesign file, which could have been reproduced in Scribus, but just a very time consuming job. So, from InDesign, exported a PDF 1.3, nice and simple. Then open the PDF in GSview. Use the pstoedit plug-in to again convert it into a Sketch file. Open Sketch and the file is perfect on screen. Export SVG. Open in Scribus, we're almost there. Reopen the SVG in Sodipodi, re-save as plain SVG. Import into Scribus. Results: a perfect mirror of the original PDF.</p>
-<p>Caveats: This will work best with EPS or PDF files which have text, or vector elements like curves or lines. Forget files which have photographs or complex gradients. But for converting logos, tables and even in some cases stylized text, this is a novel, but useful way to get artwork into Scribus, which can then be not only edited, but you can be sure it will reproduce perfectly in PDF or any kind of printing.</p>
-
-<p><strong><em>Lessons:</em></strong> First, <strong>pstoedit</strong> is a really remarkable tool which is made much easier to use via GSview. The conversion quality, just with the defaults was amazing. The curves in the Scribus EPS matched the SVG perfectly - colors too. Second, re-saving a complex image format in an application which is different from the one which created it sometimes has an effect of "cleaning up" a file. The opposite can also be true in my experience. Third, do not be afraid to experiment a bit, especially with SVG. SVG is wonderful file format with many capabilities. However, it is relatively new and no application open source or commercial has perfected its import or export. Moreover, no one vector editor can support the entire SVG spec.</p>
-
-<p>So, now you know why SVG is my new favorite file format.</p>
</body>
-</html>
+</html>
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