[Scribus] Placing PDFs

[Craig Ringer]

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> Scribus 1.2.4.1 on Ubuntu AMD64 Dapper
> 
> 1) Is there a way to place more than the first page of a PDF file?

Not yet, though as GhostScript supports page ranges there's no reason 
why not except that nobody has got around to making the required changes 
though the image handling code. I had it done a while ago, actually, but 
got a bit stuck trying to add a page number control to the Get Picture 
dialog box to allow pageno selection (for preview & opening), then got 
distracted by other things.

Finding out how many pages in the PDF isn't so easy, but it wouldn't be 
too bad to just replace the preview with "bad page or page number out of 
range" when gs fails.

> A
> manual method is adequate, as I need to do this only with files of a
> few pages long.

Multivalent might do the job, and of course Acrobat (*not* Adobe Reader) 
  can split PDFs if you have it.

> 2) Is there a way to embed the PDFs in the Scribus document? (Sorry if
> this is a stupid question -- I am just starting to use Scribus.) I
> placed them from the CD, then later opened the file when I didn't have
> the CD in the drive, and the PDFs were gone.

No; as with any other bitmap image they're only supported by reference. 
Just copy them to the same place as your scribus document (keeping 
everything in a directory) then add them from there.

> I have plenty of disk
> space, so I don't care if it makes the Scribus file large.

You'd care when you saw how QDom would cope with a file like that - it'd 
turn into a gibbering pile of goo. If we ever switch to a SAX based 
parser embedding files in the document might be something that can be 
supported as an alternative (alternately there's the option of a zip 
container format). I would personally be amazed if anybody made this a 
priority though, and wouldn't expect to see it any time in the near or 
medium future.

--
Craig Ringer