[scribus] Best practice: creating a template

[Peter Palmreuther]

On 12/29/10 9:38 pm, John Culleton wrote:
> Scribus is aimed primarily at printed rather than web products, 
> although there is a choice when you produce a pdf.  For one thing the 
> typical pdf produced by Scribus is very large. 

As I'm talking about a primarily text based newsletter I think file size will
not be the big problem.
But what alternatives exist to create an electronic newsletter that good to
read (literally!) by people not necessarily used to electronic media?
I honestly do hate MS Word or OOo for this, because it reformats depending on
moon phase and time of day (I know this is an excessive statement, but my
point should be clear).
And I'm pretty sure a vast majority of this newsletters recipients will print
it. Yes, this is ecologically stupid. But what can I do? So my best effort
would be to produce something that reduces waste. And what's worse than
something you designed to be on one or two pages and at destination is printed
on two or three, because one or two lines made their way down due to somehow
different printer or printer driver settings.

So we're again at "creating a printable product". The UA-thing is something
additional for the visually disabled recipient ... The main focus of my
initial request should have been read on "template creation", dynamic content
and scrapbook ...

> AFAIK text reflow and PDF are not compatible. For text reflow you should 
> probably use HTML or XHTML. 

Yes and no. AFAIK text reflow can be possible. See eBooks for example.
Sure, it's not a defined result than anymore regarding to it's visual
representation. But that's not the point.
If a PDF contains all structural information necessary to be ABLE to reflow
text a "not PDF"-view on the information is possible. This is useful for
eBooks as well as necessary for something like screen readers.
And if the text for example contains hyphenation information a screen reader
can flawlessly read the text.
I think we can agree a blind person does not care about 100% defined page
layout PDF offers. OTOH it's not sensible to be enforced to create two
documents ... One for people gaining from efforts put into good typesetting
and one containing only pure information for those who use a screen reader.
Redundancy of information has (in general) always been a bad thing in IT,
doesn't it?
-- 
Best regards,

Peter