[scribus] bringing in files from ms publisher

[K.King]

If you are using Scribus on Windows and have MS Pub on same then you can 
copy and paste the content bit by bit in various ways. It is useful as 
you can check what settings were used for the original document like 
measurements of margins, fonts, images etc.

If you are using Scribus on Linux or Mac then access at same time to the 
pc that the ms pub document was created on can help with the checking of 
settings as mentioned above.

Also if possible it can be useful to create a PDF of the original using 
either full version of Acrobat or free PDFCreator (or ilk) software. 
This helps to have the original layout to work from and also because you 
can copy and paste the text at least. Images can be more tricky, I think 
it is preferable to have the original image or in some cases save the 
image out of the pub document into a jpeg on Windows and copy it across.

If you are moving across machines/platforms you obviously need to look 
at fonts used, and decide if you need the original fonts or can use 
similar alternatives.

The usage of fonts has been the biggest issue I've come across, one 
thing to bear in mind even if you are staying on a Windows platform is 
that for some fonts MS Pub can create bold or italic versions of (by 
magic) but if there is no true bold or italic version of the font 
Scribus will not.

Also if you have not found out when you copy and paste into Scribus it 
does not (unless recent change?) retain the font and it's attributes 
from where you copied (i.e. via the clipboard). So you have to reapply 
these, which if there has been a lot of different fonts, sizes, and 
attributes used can be tedious. However there is (at least one 
workaround) if you are prepared for it. You can copy and paste into an 
Open Office Writer document, this retains everything (subject to font 
availability) and you can save that as an "ODT" document which you can 
then import into Scribus using a Text Frame and choose the Get Text option.

K.