[scribus] Search/Replace for Character Styles (RMLL brainstorming)

[Manuel]

Hello dear Scribus List,

I have been spending two nice days at the RMLL libre software
convention in Geneva, meeting up with Ale, Cédric, Dimitri, Pierrick
and other awesome people (it's great to meet you guys face to face!),
and of course we spent all the time talking and debating about Scribus.

This morning during a brainstorming session with Pierrick and Cédric,
we tackled a few issues that have complicated all my Scribus
workflows, and aren't still solved in the dev version as far as I know
(at least they weren't covered in Ale's overview of upcoming 1.6
killer features).

One of the biggest improvements to me would be : the availability of
Character Styles in the Search/Replace window.

Why is this important? This function would offer a great workaround
against the loss of style information (italic, bold etc) that occurs
whenever we import text from OpenOffice / ODT files.

The current situation:
1. We import the ODT file, Scribus treats all bold/italic as local styles.
2. We apply some paragraph style to the text: all bold/italic gets overriden :-(
3. We have to slowly re-create all occurrences of bold/italic.

A better workflow would be:
1. We import the ODT file.
2. We create character styles for italic, bold, or whatever we need.
3. We use Search/Replace to apply those character styles to every
occurrence in one step :-)
4. Now we can apply the paragraph style, knowing that the character
styles will be preserved.

It has been requested some time ago:
http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=4538

But there hasn't been much discussion around this, so I believe the
usefulness of the feature needs to be pointed out. I am convinced that it
would solve a real, recurring problem.

That's it for tonight, looking forward to the Python scripting
workshop tomorrow morning :)

Manuel