[scribus] Long Document Preparation Workflows

[Aaron W. Hsu]

On Sat, 09 Jan 2010 10:12:01 -0500, Gregory Pittman  
<gregp_ky at yahoo.com> wrote:

> This is how Christoph and I (disclaimer: Christoph did the layout work)  
> managed to make the PDF for our Scribus manual (400+ pages), so quite  
> large projects are possible.

Were you able to manage cross-references with another tool? How did you  
keep consistent automatic styling with Character Styles?

I wouldn't mind if I had to manage cross-references and the like through  
other programs if that information could be updated easily in the Scribus  
file. However, if I have to say, make another edition, and the  
cross-references change, I may have to restyle the entire book because I  
had to reimport my text, and I couldn't reimport the exact same styles  
that I had (manual tweaking is lost). Is there a way to fix this?

Additionally, while importing from ODT works to some extent, it seems to  
use the styling from ODT, and not from Scribus. I don't want the writers  
to be in control of the style. I want them to feel comfortable writing in  
Text editors and word processors, confident that when they send it to me,  
and I import it, their style "classes" will stay the same, but that I can  
alter the styling of these classes easily. This doesn't seem possible, as  
a new import of text overwrites the styles again.

I guess, the thing that gets me is that DTP software should allow all the  
content to be written elsewhere, and allow consistent styling to be apply  
automatically to incoming text, ignoring the stylings that may come in  
 from a word processor. The text import works, but it fails to understand  
character styles. If I could manage this, so that no manual tweaking were  
required after my classes were set up in Scribus and I reimported copy, I  
think I could manage easily enough to make the appropriate  
cross-references and idnexes by managing them with outside tools.

	Aaron W. Hsu

-- 
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.