[Scribus] How do you guys share scribu files for collaboration?

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 17:11 +0800, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 	I'm wondering if anyone here uses scribus as a means to publish a
> magazine, MyOSS Mag (http://mag.my-opensource.org) uses it for their
> Online free mag. 
> 
> Right now, as we're getting more people to contribute, one obstacle I
> see is how to share the scribus src file to all the contributors/team so
> that all of us can so the job of editing/proof reading etc without
> needing to step on each others' toes.
> 
> I tried to use subversion to share the src, but seems like diffs don't
> go too well with scribus due to all the formatting etc.
> 
> How are you guys doing it?

The method currently used at work - which doesn't use Scribus, but Quark
presently has similar limitations (without expensive CMS support
add-ons) - is to:

	- have all editorial done in word processors, subbed, and only
	  then imported into Quark

	- Use one file per page to avoid access conflicts. Our printers
	  want one PDF file per page anyway, so this works well. We'd
	  just integrate the pages in Adobe Acrobat if they wanted a
	  single document.

	- Create ads as EPS files then import them into the pages. This
	  helps further separate the various chunks of work and let
	  people work on an ad while the page with that ads is being
	  worked on by someone else.
	  This might not work so great in Scribus because linked EPS/PDF
	  files are presently rasterised on import. If that's OK for
	  you, then cool. Otherwise you may want to find a different
          approach.

The above is clumsy, but pretty typical of older / smaller DTP
workflows. There are commercial add-ins to most DTP tools to reduce the
amount of workflow crud you must endure - think Adobe InCopy, CMS
integration plugins, etc.

Currently, no equivalents are available for Scribus. A copy management
system has been discussed and there is quite a bit of interest in it,
it's just a matter of finding the time and people to write it. A similar
situation applies with "shared document" work, WebDAV support,
document-in-database support, "externally linked text," etc.

Right now, I'd probably use a shared filesystem - with reliable locking
- and one file per page, and I'd do as much of my copy-editing as
possible in external tools. It's not something I have to worry about
since my Scribus use is currently just for myself.

There will be a new file format introduced a bit later in the 1.3
development series (Oleksandr Moskalenko has draft DTDs almost ready)
that should among many other things hopefully improve the diff-ability
of the .sla format considerably. This might help when working in svn,
etc, though it's still unlikely it'd be a good idea to have a tool that
doesn't understand the format do merges (much like with the OO.o
format). Some sort of 'sla-diff' and 'sla-merge' would be awfully cool,
though.

I'd be very interested in hearing how others go about things. Some
information on various workflows, workflow options, desirable program
features to improve workflows (and what folks feel is missing now)
might be worth putting up on the wiki.

--
Craig Ringer