[Scribus] Ideas on collaboration

[Craig Ringer]

Louis Desjardins wrote:

>> I think it can be done in OOo. Since OOo is not just an office suite 
>> but also a development platform, all of its features should be 
>> accessible via plug-ins or macros.
>>
>> OOo currently has an extended search & replace feature which allows 
>> you to search for formatting. With OOo 2.0 coming soon, it would be 
>> possible to run many formats through OOo, search for bolds and 
>> italics, then replace formatted text strings with exactly these 
>> strings in markup and finally save to plain text.
>>
>> So, yes, in theory it can be done, but it would need someone with 
>> sufficient knowledge in OOo programming.
>
>
> Thank you Christoph!
>
> Can we dream that Scribus team and OO.o team develop some kind of 
> friendly interface so users can achieve that kind of formatting easily?

It's called the UNO interface to OpenOffice.org, and it already exists. 
It's non-trivial to utilize though, and some "impedence-matching" 
between Scribus and OO.o would be required. Plus, of course, a bunch of 
coding to connect Scribus up to UNO. There's a Python UNO interface, 
PyUNO, and Scribus has a Python plug-in, so that might be a very 
interesting approach once the facilities for formatting Scribus text 
from Python can be improved (especially since I now know how to put 
non-intrusive "hooks" for Python into Scribus to trigger on events). It 
should also be possible to do interesting things from a C++ Scribus 
plugin that uses UNO.

In addition to things like those mentioned above, a big potential use of 
UNO is to write a "universal importer" that uses OO.o and its importers 
to transparently import any document format understood by OO.o. Again, 
it's just a matter of finding someone with the time and and interest to 
investigate this.

--
Craig Ringer