[Scribus] end-to-end publishing solution??

[Peter Nermander]

> I'd think it would be terrific to find some way to glue together
> Scribus, OpenOffice, Gimp, a CMS app, a wiki, etc. to create an
> end-to-end publishing solution that takes companies through the entire
> catalog creation lifecycle and gets new info on/from the websites fast.
> Fold in Web 2.0, and it's a goal.

This is something I have been thinking a lot about.I think it would require
content to be better separated from layout, but can then be quite easily done.

If not only images, but also all text, was included by links, it would become a
lot easier. Then you could have one master file for the layout (a Scribus .sla)
and a number of subdirectories with (version controlled) "text" files and
images. ("text" file in this case means a file representing the content of a
text frame). Probably the version control could be handled by subversion or
something similar (possibly something handling binary files, such as images,
better).

I have used LyX a lot before and LyX has built in support for RCS so all my
files were version controlled by RCS.

With all content as separate files, in some kind of version control system,
concurrent working would be easy (even more easy if the editing tools have built
in support for the version control system).

If the story editor was made to work more or less "stand alone" it could be used
to work on the "text" files. (I would love to see a mix between the story editor
and LyX:-) And any image editing program could be used for the images (Inkscape
for SVG, GIMP or Cinepaint for JPEG/TIFF etc).

The master file for the layout (the .sla file) could be open for concurrent
working on different pages by some kind of "page lock" mechanism built into
Scribus. Maybe Scribus could be designed to keep each page in its own file too,
allowing easier version control of the layout? It's just a matter of splitting
the .sla into several parts at suitable places.

This part does however not include the "wiki" part, but I think a wiki could be
used separately before taking the content into the layout.

Also it does not take care of the web+print part, but since the "text" files
would be XML som kind of XML transform tool could probably be used to lift them
into a web design instead of into a Scribus design.



/Peter