[scribus-dev] Add-In Development Documentation

[Rob Oakes]

Dear Scribus Users,

At the moment, I'm putting together some material for a blog post about
creating eBooks (ePub and Kindle) from Scribus and LyX. This blog post
is based on a talk I was going to give last year and never had time to
finish. (I got really interested in the whole thing again after playing
around with iBooks Author and wondering how hard it would be to create
similar books with open tools.)

Right now, I'm pretty psyched because it seems like all of the bits are
present to really make beautiful things. However, they need some gluing
together.

To that end, I'm going to write Python code so that Scribus can export
its styles as CSS and import an eBook style-sheet for editing. The
inability to design (rather than code) style sheets is one of the
biggest weaknesses in open eBook tools. Scribus already has a fantastic
styles editor, which I think can be adapted nicely to this purpose. As
I've started to experiment with options, I had a couple of questions:

 1. Is there a guide to scripting with Scribus1.4? The only guide I was
    able to find was quite old.
 2. What about up to date documentation about render frames? I'm hopeful
    that these can be used to create and insert dynamic content (like
    HTML gallery widgets, models, and such).
 3. Is there any way to access the Qt UI controls in Scribus via the
    ScriptingNG interface? I know that this can be done on Linux,
    because I experimented with it a while ago
    (http://blog.oak-tree.us/index.php/2010/08/25/scribus-dockwidgets).
    But, as I understand it, Python ships its own interpreter on Mac and
    Windows.
 4. If you there isn't currently a way, would it be possible to have you
    incorporate either PyQt or PySide so that it is possible? This would
    allow for robust extensions to be created that use the same UI
    components as Scribus does, instead of TCL/TK.

If the experiments with CSS go well, my next step is to experiment with
exporting material  to ePub3 documents (which offer much of the
HTML5/CSS3 goodness that Apple is borrowing for iBooks Author). After
looking at everything, I think it may be possible to create templates
for iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc. that are every bit as nice as what iBooks
Author puts out.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Any input you can offer regarding the
questions above would be very welcome.

Cheers,

Rob Oakes
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