[scribus] Printing an SLA without using X11

[Matt Gushee]

Jon wrote:
>> Is it 
>> so much bother to open Scribus to print a file?
> 
> Yes, because that requires a human being.
> 
> I need to be able to print (or export to PDF or ghostscript) SLAs with
> no human intervention.

You seem very insistent on using Scribus for this project, but I wonder 
whether it's really the best tool for the job. Do you need a large 
number of templates, or are they very complex? If not, maybe a non-GUI 
solution would work.

> Even if Scribus could automatically open and run Scribus Python scripts
> from a shell (scribus --run-script <script.py), while ugly as pages
> would get printed client-side as opposed to server-side, that would
> immediately make Scribus exponentially more valuable as it's the perfect
> authoring tool for letters and forms.

OK, so you're already planning to use Python. I think if you don't 
absolutely need to use Scribus, you can find Python libraries for every 
part of the project:

  * A database interface should be no problem.

  * Generating PDF, again no problem: check out ReportLab
    (www.reportlab.org). It's been around for several years and has
    worked well for me.

  * You can probably automate your printing w/ pkipplib
    (www.pykota.com/software/pkipplib). Haven't tried this one, but
    it looks promising.

  * There's also a DB report generator called PythonReports,
    (pythonreports.sourceforge.net), though it seems to be in alpha
    status.

  * And if you really want a graphical design tool, you might be able
    to make your templates (esp. for forms) in SVG using Inkscape;
    there are several SVG libs for Python, though I haven't used any
    of them. In the worst case you might have to build your own SVG
    processor on top of a generic XML processor.

Not that I don't love Scribus. But it's still very young and is a long 
way from doing everything we might like.

-- 
Matt Gushee