[scribus] Creating multi- page magazine

[Sveinn í Felli]

Hi,

Þann þri  9.okt 2012 18:54, skrifaði Joe Zeff:
> On 10/09/2012 11:28 AM, wena-parry at talktalk.net wrote:
>> Greg,
>>
>> I have tested a peace of text in  Open Office and saved a
>> file in ODT,
>> but that wont even import into Scribus 1.4.1. I can past
>> the text but no
>> stile at all.
>>
>> My OS Windows XP Pro What is LO/OO there is a few
>> reference to this in
>> the mail?
>>
>
> How strange.  For the last several years I've been creating
> my weekly contributions to an APA (Think of it as a two-page
> newsletter.) in Open Office until Fedora migrated to Libre
> Office and importing it into Scribus for formatting with no
> problems.  In my case, however, all of the styles are
> imposed in Scribus.
>

Strange indeed.

Paragraph styles in an .odt from several versions of
LibreOffice import quite well (latest LO is version 3.6.2,
Icelandic on  LinuxMint 13, 64bit). Scribus Version 1.4.1.

The only issue I've experienced so far is when a font does 
not exist in real bold/italic versions, character styles may 
get a bit strange if the font substitution is not adequate.

So I'd recommend carefully choosing fonts and styles in 
LibreOffice/OpenOffice before importing to Scribus.

Example from a .sla file:

  <para PARENT="test_Preformatted_20_Text"/>
  <ITEXT CH="When I have tried it, you should be able to
import simple applications"/>
  <para PARENT="test_Preformatted_20_Text"/>
  <ITEXT CH="of "/>
  <ITEXT FONT="Liberation Serif Regular" CH="bold"/>
  <ITEXT CH=" and "/>
  <ITEXT FONT="Liberation Serif Regular" CH="italics"/>
  <ITEXT CH=" as character styles, but I think using actual"/>
  <para PARENT="test_Preformatted_20_Text"/>
  <ITEXT CH="paragraph and character styles in LibreOffice
works best. You should"/>

In this case the bold/italic attributes are messed up into 
the same plain character style, forcing a manual 
intervention to recover their differences.
The font for the test_Preformatted_20_Text style was Droid
Sans Mono which does not have bold/italic versions on my
system. Simple font substitution; Liberation Serif for Droid
Sans Mono, during import does not carry over these 
attributes - Scribus can't guess that if I want to 
substitute all missing fonts with Liberation Serif, then it 
should use Liberation Serif Italic for the italics etc. 
Fortunately Scribus is too precise for that.

However, by using DejaVu Sans (Book) as a font for the
style in the .odt, the result is quite different:

  <para PARENT="test_Preformatted_20_Text"/>
  <ITEXT CH="When I have tried it, you should be able to
import simple applications"/>
  <para PARENT="test_Preformatted_20_Text"/>
  <ITEXT CH="of "/>
  <ITEXT FONT="DejaVu Sans Bold" CH="bold"/>
  <ITEXT CH=" and "/>
  <ITEXT FONT="DejaVu Sans Oblique" CH="italics"/>
  <ITEXT CH=" as character styles, but I think using actual"/>
  <para PARENT="test_Preformatted_20_Text"/>
  <ITEXT CH="paragraph and character styles in LibreOffice
works best. You should"/>

In this case Scribus finds easily the bold/italic 
counterparts of the same font. Which is understandable 
because the Droid font is designed for screen viewing, not 
printing.

This is just saying that character styles coming from 
OOo/LibO are sort of hardcoded, while paragraph styles are 
more flexible.

And saying that at least on Linux, Scribus does a good job 
of importing .odt styles.
Maybe the font substitution is somewhat problematic on Windows ?

Just thoughts,

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