[Scribus] Import of ODT file into Scribus.

[Louis Desjardins]

John R. Culleton a ?crit :

> As an experiment I am trying out a novel in Scribus. I converted the 
> client's half dozen .DOC files to ODT format in Open Office, and I 
> imported the first one (prologue and 10 chapters) into Scribus.  Here 
> are some problems.
> 1. Every step I take is so slow that I could almost take a coffee 
> break between request and completion.
> 
> 2. The novel text is in a uniform style. However Scribus managed to 
> generate 28 different styles for essentally identical paragraphs. Is 
> there something I should do as part of the importation process to  
> reduce the number of styles? Or should I just go through and change 
> the style of each such paragraph to a common one?

Hi John,

I have encountered similar behavior before and for this reason I check 
the "Text only" check box before importing text. That way, Scribus 
creates no stylesheet from the OO.o file.

I must confess I haven't tested this thoroughly lately so I cannot give 
a better advice on your version. What I know for sure is the "Text only" 
works just well, provided your text doesn't have much enrichment into it.

There might be a key towards the solution of this issue looking at the 
options of import, when Scribus can create stylesheets based on the name 
of the file. Thus, if the same style is applied to different files (and 
filename, of course) it might be the reason why you're getting so many 
stylesheets at import.

In any event I am interested in knowing how it turns out.

> 
> 3. Paragraph indentation is excessive, but when I edit the style it 
> shows nothing on the indentation graphic. How do I globally create a 
> smaller indentation? This relates to comment 2 above I suspect. In 
> hte sory editor the indent deletes as if it were a tab character.

Here I suggest that you use the Search & Replace dialog to look for and 
replace tab char by nothing. Then (or even before) you could set this 
first line indention (I assume this is what you are talking about) in 
the Paragraph Style dialog.

I am not sure if this will help. Please let me know.

Louis
> 
> I will probably typset this novel in LaTeX.  But I would like to work 
> toward a viable methodology for using Scribus in similar projects. 
> 
> The environment is Slackware Linux and   Scribus 1.3.3.10.


-- 
Louis Desjardins
Mardigrafe inc.
Graphisme et impression ?cologique
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