[scribus] How to personalize a booklet?

[Gregory Pittman]

Ronald Wiplinger (Lists) wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-07-04 at 10:01 +0100, John Beardmore wrote:
>   
>> Ronald Wiplinger (Lists) wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I have a pdf booklet - some are created with Scribus, some are made with
>>> Acrobat 9Pro.
>>> These booklets should be sold on a hosted web server (apache with php).
>>>
>>> We would be thrilled if we could personalize the booklet during selling,
>>> like:
>>>
>>> 1. add a remark on each page, like    Teacher <name> uses <title>
>>> booklet
>>> (the buyer is the teacher)
>>>
>>> 2. a personalized additional page (welcome page number 3)
>>>
>>> 3. the booklets should be THEN copy and print protected
>>>
>>> All these should be done during the sales.
>>>
>>>
>>> Is it possible? or What is possible? Please guide me to the right place.
>>>
>>> bye
>>>
>>> Ronald 
>>>       
>> There's a certain irony to this sort of thing with open source software.
>>
>>     
>
>
> Was the question I asked to difficulty?
>   
Personally, I think this is doable using Scribus as a component of the 
process, though I admit I could be wrong, and I would add that it's not 
likely to be easy to create something that ends up being easy to use.

I think the 2 avenues I would consider if I were doing this would be:

1. devising a script to use the static parts and assembled along with 
the variable  parts. Starting from "scratch", ie, no document 
whatsoever, is a big scripting task. Perhaps better to load the static 
document, then run a script to add a layer and/or pages where needed. An 
example of some rather complex scripting operations is in the Bleed 
script, which takes an original document, all of its components, and 
creates an entirely new one with larger dimensions and the added marks.

2. using a text editor to do a search and replace in the Scribus SLA 
file. This might also benefit from the use of a script to avoid errors.


While these may seem like attractive approaches, both require gaining 
some familiarity with Scribus and its GUI. For one thing, you may think 
that doing various tasks manually is too time-consuming, but once you 
learn Scribus and the various ways to quickly accomplish various 
operations, you may be able to trim this scripting or editing down to 
something quite small and therefore not so difficult.

Most of the learning of Scribus regardless of your information sources 
comes from using Scribus.

Greg