[scribus] Creating multi- page magazine

[Peter Nermander]

> But, Peter, your statement that it "... might be fine if the text is mostly
> text." seems a bit absurd.  Text is text.  What I think you may have meant

Text is text. No formatting.

But in some cases, like the ones I mentioned, the author of the text
will have applied a lot of formatting that is necessary for the text
to be correctly interpreted by the reader.

Using a text editor to work on such a text will take away all
formatting, and the work (which might take hours) has to be done
again. For the types of texts I am talking about (scientific or legal)
you can not leave that to the editor, because it is a critical part of
the content.

I am not talking of text where whole sentences are in italics, nor
text where every use of a work should have a specific formatting. I am
talking about text where a word sometimes need to have a different
formatting to distinguish from the same word with another meaning.

Imagine a text using two languages, say English and French (a text
about cooking might for example use french terms in the middle of
sentences). Would you translate all text to English for import into
Scribus and then let the editor translate the French parts back to
French? That would become a lot of unnecessary work for the editor.

Of course one solution might be to have to author use some kind of
markup instead of formatting, but that might be hard to teach the
authors (imagine a 60 yo physician writing a scientific text) and
misaligned markup might not be discovered until the text is imported
into Scribus.

So, what I objected against was that using a text editor some way
would be the optimal way to handle text that should be imported into
Scribus.

Writing directly in Scribus however is usually not the best way. What
I personally would like to see is something in the line of a stand
alone version of the Story Editor, or something like LyX, where text
could be created and be easily marked up with a limited set of markup.
I think that being able to apply named paragraph and character styles
to the text would be sufficient. The editor could have options to
change the visual appearance of the styles, but when importing into
Scribus only the names of the styles would be used.

A word processor is probably the best we have today, the problem is
that it will be hard to choose what formatting to import and what
formatting to discard.

/Peter