[Scribus] Scribus Digest, Vol 49, Issue 54

[James Gilmore]

The way it is done today is quite abstruse.

Yes, indeed. Figuring out the path from Docbook to print is frustrating.
Particularly because there's not clear documentation that I've found for
getting DocBookNG (the newest incarnation of DocBook) to pdf. I'm not
convinced there's tools to do it yet, in fact.

I'd love to see scribus handle xml in the editor. And make smart decisions
based on tags. I want to be able to tag words using docbook, and when I
build my index in scribus, it looks for those tags and builds the index
based on what page the word ended up on, with hyperlinks between the word
and the index within the pdf. I want scribus to be smart enough to see a
<sidebar> tag and know as it's building the page from the docbook source
that it needs to put all the text from the sidebar tag into it's own frame,
on that page. I could go on, but you probably get the idea. All these things
could be (fairly easily) scripted, if Scribus only kept the xml tags within
the text. I don't really know how difficult it would be to implement in
scribus, because I haven't delved into the code.

Consider: If I'm right, and there's no working toolchain to get from the
latest implementation of DocBook to print, then implementing an importer
that makes intelligent decisions (assigning text to appropriately named
frames, attaching titles to the Table of Contents, building a
bibliography/index/glossary/etc. similarly to the way it builts TOCs, and
hyperlinking tags to/from the appropriate places as far as bibs and index
go) would position Scribus as THE toolchain for DocBook, from now into the
forseeable future.
Scribus truly needs to be xml aware. It doesn't need to format the text, but
it needs to be aware of the kinds of semantics that DocBook is aware of, and
generally _keep_ inline xml tags, as a minimum.

As for database connectivity, I'm all for it, but having scribus be
semantically aware of what kind of data it's holding, if only so it can be
manipulated by scripts,  is many, many orders of magnitude more useful and
important, in my opinion.
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