[scribus-dev] Text import

[Louis Desjardins]

2013/5/28 "Christoph Schäfer" <christoph-schaefer at gmx.de>

> Hi all,
>
> Speaking to people of the typesetting and page design profession who
> generally acknowledge the achievements of Scribus, a generally recurring
> theme is the lack of support for RTF (they genuinely hate DOC and DOCX for
> all the problems these file formats create). They also wonder why it's not
> possible to export the content of text frames to RTF, HTML or ODT.
>

Hi,

Being able to export/import a text content with its stylesheets is a must.

The round trip from WP to DTP to WP should be doable without issue.

The typographic features should also be transferable from one app to the
other without issue. If something cannot be handled the same way, we need
to discuss between teams from WP and DTP. At least, the ODT guys and the
Scribus guys could concentrate on polishing the edges so both apps fit
together in terms of typographic features.

The future seems to me along that path.

Considering the growing need for multi-media publishing, print and digital,
I think that every aspects of text handling would need to be looked at in
such a way as to insure users can easily switch from one to the other
without having to reformat.

The more easy it is to work back and forth from WP to DTP will also ease
the work of proofreaders when for any reason heavy editing is needed. Going
back to a WP in the hand of a dedicated proofreader is far more efficient
when that happens than asking production people to enter each corrections
by hand in the DTP app (with the risk of introducing new typos). Being able
to reimport the edited text into Scribus while keeping the formatting is a
goal we can aim at.

Louis



>
> After some research in the intertube, some of this seems to be a
> low-hanging fruit for beginners:
>
> - Qt supports HTML and ODT (
> http://qt-project.org/wiki/Handling_Document_Formats);
>
> - There is an LGPL 2.1-licensed RTF parser library for Qt (
> https://launchpad.net/rtf-qt);
>
> - The TEA editor (http://tea-editor.sourceforge.net/) provides text
> import filters for KWord (KWD), AbiWord (ABW), DOCX, RTF, and FB2 files.
> Its licence is GPL v3, so one cannot copy the code, but a potential
> developer could look at it.
>
> There are also some Python libs for import/export available, just in case
> one of our scripting gurus is getting interested.
>
> Does anyone want to bite?
>
>
> Best,
>
> Christoph
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