[Scribus] Scribus1.3.0 -- paragraph styles in incoming text.

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 09:43 +0000, Peter Barnes wrote:

> This, and the subsequent posts, are very interesting although I doubt
> that I will have the time to learn regex for this purpose. Even if I
> did learn it, what does one do with the regex once it is written (I
> was tempted to write "where should I insert it" but I don't want to
> attract any witty comments!). Should it be keyed in somewhere in the
> Scribus Get text/text filter box?

Yep, you use the "text filter" GetText importer.

It's much like using the text filter normally, except that the text
entry boxes for search text and replace text are interpreted as regex
when you check the appropriate checkbox (not labelled, but it has a
useful tooltip).

> My impression is that Scribus has been written (so far) primarily for
> people producing graphic-rich brochures etc and not for those like me
> who handle technical documents with large amounts of text that is full
> of italics, subscripts, symbols and the like.

I can't speak for the goals of Franz and the others, but the end result
seems to suggest that, yes. Technical document support is a weakness
currently. Most of that is the text handling - but that's something
that's squarely in the 1.3.x crosshairs.

> Although it is probably very good at doing the former task, from my
> perspective it seems like Scribus has lots of bells & whistles but
> there is still a wheel missing ;)

Yeah. For technical document work that's not unreasonable. Char styles,
conditional text, efficient handling of large bodies of text, etc are
rather important for that sort of thing. I'd point you at FrameMaker but
it's (a) expensive and (b) basically dead-ended. I don't know if you can
even buy it anymore...

Personally, I'd love to see more support for technical documents and
similar long documents. There are just lots of other things I'd love to
see first - given that I work in newspapers. It's a matter of
priorities ... and I don't think long documents are something any of the
dev team specifically focus on. That said, lots of the features useful
for long documents are desirable for many other reasons - and some, like
char styles, are pretty crucial generally. The 1.3 roadmap reflects
that.

--
Craig Ringer