[scribus] to get a textfile

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 19 Nov 2013 14:30:01 -0500
john Culleton <John at wexfordpress.com> dijo:

>Sometimes Scribus can handle an odt file, but
>sometimes not. The surest source is a plain
>text file. If you don't have one then save one
>from Open Office, Libre Office or Acrobat Reader. 

We all have a different workflow. I use Scribus to lay out materials
that I have written myself. I am not a designer and I never work with
documents produced by others. 

It is possible to write directly in Scribus, but it is far easier to do
it in a word processor like OO/LO. And while writing you frequently
want to apply some simple formatting, e.g., italics, lest you forget at
the end. It is during the moment of creation that the need for such
things occurs.

The problem with saving from OO/LO as a plain text file is that it will
strip all such local formatting. After I import the text file into
Scribus I have to go through and try to remember where I applied local
formatting when I was writing the piece. And it's not just bold and
italic; it's indenting the margins and adjusting the font size for a
long quote, setting a header larger and bold, and many other things. 

Luckily for me I have never had a problem importing an OO/LO document
into Scribus. Even more fortunate is that such imports preserve at
least paragraph styles. So I can just do the formatting in OO/LO with
styles and it all comes into Scribus intact. The only thing I miss
(Scribus 1.4.3) is being able to import character styles, but hopefully
that will come along eventually.