[Scribus] Linked content

[Michael Koren]

Paul Fine-2 wrote:
> 
> The newsletter has an issue number which is incremented every month.  
> This issue appears at the top of every left hand page, and also on the 
> cover page.  The instance on every lefthand page is easily handled by 
> putting it in the Master Page, but I want to link the frame on the cover 
> so that I only have to change the issue number in one place. Is there a 
> way to do this?
> 

Hmm, linked content. That would be very useful and I think I've wanted to do
it before too, but I don't think you can at the moment.

Some kind of content library approach might be nice in the future for this
kind of thing. I suppose when externally linked text is available you could
have all instances drawn from an external file (if external content could be
at the character level), but that's a bit clunky.

Thinking about it, it may actually be possible that my summer of code
project could allow this.

(Excuse the rest of this message while I think out loud here.... :)

It sounds like modifying the text engine, which I'm not doing, but I think
I'm going to need to be able to preprocess text content anyway to support
structured content before giving it to the text layouter, and I was planning
to support sequences of frames with the same content.

If the content to be linked were tagged, e.g. with XML tags, both on the
cover and in the master page, then a sequence selector (input filter) could
isolate it and apply identity dependency relations between the instances, so
that my library would automatically keep them synchronized when one instance
is changed, but this mini-sequence across frames would be tagged
non-structural so it's ignored by the default layout style.

This would be a common use case, so I could provide ready-made styles for
it. From the user side it would be a matter of putting the tags around the
content to be linked and using a style which inherits the relevant sequence
selector...or once the content is in Scribus using such a charstyle on the
content could be enough without special tags.

I just made that sound way more complicated than it is, but I don't know how
else to describe it. :) Avox, what do you think about it?

Michael
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