[Scribus] presentations

[Gregory Pittman]

Peter Linnell wrote:
> 
> You probably would be better off using the Python Scripter, plug-in to
> automate much of this. Steve Calcott has done a masterful job with his
> font sampler script, which calls Tkinter and creates a GUI to allow user
> font selection. His python script is *very* well commented.
> 
> The Scribus scripter plug-in exposes many Scribus commands to create
> pages, create text frames, set colors and more. The Scripter handbook
> docs have been recently updated as well.
> 
> I have created a number of Scribus presentation PDF and do not find
> working with text terribly difficult, especially with the Story Editor.
> What I find is important is to have your desired paragraph styles in
> place *before* bringing in text. Then, you can apply the formatting as
> the text is placed on the page. 
> 
> My hesitation is trying to recreate Scribus docs with Perl is not
> trivial. The file format, tho text XML based is rather complicated and
> has a great number of tags. The plan for Scribus 1.2+ is to re-write the
> format in more conforming XML with DTD.
> 
> The 0.8 version of the Scribus format is available for download on
> Scribus.net.
> 

Yes, I suppose you may be right. The thing is, I know some Perl but not 
Python. What I have seen of the Scripter I can't make heads or tails out 
of as a utility (my problem, not the Scripter's).

I'm already to the point that I can generate a one page presentation in 
which I can enter the text I want in the frame and it's done. There are 
a large number of tags, but most are of no interest to me.

Adding pages, frames, text within frames, changing fonts, colors and so 
forth looks quite trivial. I mostly just have to settle on an overall 
architecture regarding how many subroutines and how generic to make it. 
I want to make sure I leave the jobs for Scribus that are really more 
dependent on visual feedback and mouse-oriented. This is supposed to be 
a bulk-slide generator for later tweaking with Scribus. Aside from that, 
it's an intellectual puzzle -- programming fun.

I had thought that it would be tricky to get Perl to insert the Scribus 
carriage return (Ctrl-E), but it turns out you just hold down Ctrl and 
press E (duh!).

I briefly considered writing in XML with a DTD to create the .sla file, 
but I don't know enough about XML yet.

Thanks for the info about the Scribus format -- even if I don't need it 
I *must* find out what IRENDER is!

Gregory Pittman