[Scribus] Google Summer of Code 2007

[Gregory Pittman]

Steve Herrick wrote:
> On 3/15/07, Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> I think there is a decided asymmetry of content. Something like the
>> relationship between TIFF and JPEG. HTML is an imprecise, relative
>> format that adjusts to its environment, while Scribus defines a strict
>> environment, with high precision. So going from Scribus to HTML is
>> feasible, though certainly requiring some significant work. Going from
>> HTML to Scribus creates many problems, just like going from JPEG to TIFF
>> would.
>>     
>
> I'm not clear why this would be, if you actually treat HTML as the
> markup language it is, and didn't try to use it for layout. HTML was
> only ever meant to give a document structure, not design -- that's
> what CSS is for. Scribus should have no difficulty with structured
> documents.
>   
the question is, is CSS the best tool for this? One could certainly 
envision a format, and we've long awaited a more XML-compliant format 
for Scribus, that would fill the requirement to allow easily translation 
to the HTML environment. In going from a less dense environment to a 
more dense one (data-wise), on a practical level you have holes which 
must be filled, for which only an approximation of intent can be formulated.
We've seen this with some other suggestions in the past, and what this 
creates is an enormous editing job in Scribus. If there is anything that 
people who do layout are particular about, it is the details involved in 
layout. Imagine a multipage document, in which dozens of frames must be 
adjusted, perhaps moved from one page to another. You might just want to 
say, "Skip this feeble attempt and give me the content and I'll make the 
layout myself."

Greg