[Scribus] DocBook/xml

[Oleksandr Moskalenko]

* James Gilmore <james.d.gilmore at gmail.com> [2007-03-15 22:58:05 -0500]:

> I know this is getting long--I'll try to wrap up. One last option, if
> importing and exporting docbook is just too problematic, is creating a new
> format for scribus with similar functionality to the docbook DTD but with
> the purpose of injecting itself into scribus with styles/kerning/etc. set,
> creating  bibs/etc. as Docbook parsers do, autogenerating textboxes where
> needed. The only reason I can see doing this rather than simply using a
> docbook file, though, is for naming styles.

James,

Right now the person most involved with the scribus work that directly touches
on the new file format is avox. He might have something to add to this.
Anyway, when we were having discussions about the design of the new file
format that's recently begun making its way into 1.3.4cvs separation of the
layout and content was one of the main points. The work I've done in sketching
out the new valid xml format with the corresponding DTD was based on those
discussions. You can see some of the preliminary stuff in the "dtd" directory
of the cvs source namely scribus.dtd and scribus13.xml test file. Right now
the task is for avox to finish creating the new text/paragraph style engine
that would use some of the new file format's capabilities. Hopefully, sooner
rather then later more will be incorporated along with the evolution of the
file format itself as the discussions like the recent threads on the ML will
give us ideas. Anyway, one of the thoughts I held closely to my heart as I was
working on the dtd sketches was fine granularity of the document content, so
if there were collaborative work to be done then changes could be done by
independent editors down at least the level of paragraph and text styles would
be separate from the layout concept of canvas, pages, containers (text and
image frames, tables, etc.). So, the team has been thinking about this issue.
I guess we should take a closer look at the docbook to see what concepts we
could incorporate to make preparation of the larger documents with footnotes
and TOCs and such more streamlined and amenable to a CMS-based workflow.

Cheers,

Alex.