[Scribus] Documentation

[Maciej Hanski]

> Hello Maciej,

Hi Louis,

> 
> As a newcomer in the Linux world (part time also!!) I don't know 
> about Docbook. I am ready to use this if I can easily open it with 
> any (or most) Linux distributions. Otherwise, we could use PDF or 
> maybe OpenOffice format... Just thinking out loud!

Docbook as the Scribus manual file format is meanwhile out of the
question for reasons named by Craig, and  I'm certainly not the Docbook
expert on this mailing list, since I've just started diving into
it. Nevertheless, I think, it's worth looking on. I experienced some
vicious attacks of madness over "jumping" screen shots while translating
Niyam's tutorial and swore to myself, to never ever again use OpenOffice
or any other word processor for editing long documents. Docbook (here are some useful infos
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/ ) is simply structured XML
(or SGML) text data - you edit it once, using tags like <book>,
<chapter>, <title>, <caption>, <para>, etc., and transform it then into
the desired output file format (HTML, PDF, RTF, TeX, PS, etc.) using
appriopriate XSL stylesheets. So it is mostly up to XSL stylesheet, how
ugly or beatiful the final effect looks like. I've been editing it using Emacs with PSGML and
Docbook DTD  and I've got used to the few needed shortcuts  pretty
quickly. XEmacs or GNU Emacs are certainly included in your Linux
distribution, here is everything you need to edit XML or SGML documents
with it: http://www.snee.com/bob/sgmlfree/emcspsgm.zip (PDF, 500K). 

A small example of a Docbook file transformed into HTML:
http://www.yarpen.cz/scribus-vlna/index.cz.html

> 
> Having said that, I agree with your approach.

I submitted a feature request regarding the integration of 3rd party
docs into Scribus, perhaps would you like to add your twopence to
it: http://bugs.scribus.net/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=0000830

best regards
Maciej