[Scribus] Command Line Interface

[mark]

Craig Bradney wrote:

>On Friday 29 October 2004 18:22, mark wrote:
>  
>
>>I'm trying to work on a CLI for scribus to run python scripts w/o a
>>gui.  This would allow scribus to work as a PDF rendering engine for
>>scribus XML files as templates, or, with a little help from python, a
>>press-ready XSL-FO rendering engine.  I'm trying to modify the program
>>to do this, but it looks like the plugin system is heavily tied to QT.
>>I wouldn't mind keeping the plugin system tie to QT and requiring QT and
>>X for the command line process, but I can't seem to include
>>scriptplugin.h w/o breaking a lot of dependencies in pconsole.h and
>>other .h files in the plugin dir.  Here's my diff with the very
>>beginnings of my idea.
>>    
>>
>
>The idea is good, tho XSL-FO is not designed for press work, hence we are not 
>using it for the new Scribus 1.3 format.
>  
>
Whether or not it is designed for press work there are industries using
it for that.  I understand the differences between content-based
formatting and layout based formatting.  But at some point the
content-based formatting must be converted into a format that
respects the target meduim if it is to be printed or rendered to PDF.  I
was thinking of a conversion process to take XSL-FO language
documents and turn them into Scribus' layout-based file format, then
render them into press-ready PDFs.  Perhaps this is not possible, or
at least not practical to get good results.


>The whole program is highly tied to Qt. Will be interesting to see your idea 
>progress.
>  
>
grr...

I guess I will have to do more C++ programming than I thought.   What
are the ramifications of attaching another Python scripting interface
that is not tied to Qt, then replacing the original python interface with
the decoupled one and a Qt interface?  Is that a direction that Scribus
is willing to go towards?  I do have another project that is completely
unrelated to XSL-FO, I just need to create some course material for a
university from a database.  I python script to combine Scribus's XML
with data from a database and then render to PDF seems like the
best solution for creating custom booklets from a web site.