[scribus] InDesign to Scribus

["Christoph Schäfer"]

Ciao Marina,

> 
> Must confess though I am a bit worried about the transition, so 
> here are a few real novice questions:
> 
> - How steep a learning curve should I expect? In other words 
> -will it take hours, days or weeks (for an 'old dog' who used to 
> be a relatively fast learner) to get used to Scribus?

Hours for the basics (including consulting the included documentation and especially the "Get Started" chapter), days to figure out the details (as well as Scribus's still existing quirks, but also its advantages), weeks to let you forget your InDesign habits.

> 
> - I have InDesign files for a few manuals, as well as the 
> resulting PDFs ready for printing. Individual chapters also 
> exist in .doc format, minus some of the editing and a lot of the 
> formatting. Is there any way to extract and convert to Scribus 
> any of the formatting information from the PDF or InDesign files 
> -especially margins and styles?

As JLuc already wrote, the next version of Scribus will provide an InDesign import filter, but only for IDML and IDMS (ID snippets) files, *not* for INDD files. I suggest you download a trial version of ID CS 6 and convert all INDD files to IDML during the trial period. If you want to use the old output with Scribus 1.4.x, you can try opening the PDF files.

Regarding styles in both InDesign and Word Documents, I strongly recommend the use of LibreOffice (LO). From InDesign you can export to XHTML, which can be opened by LO. The same goes for Word documents. You can save both formats as ODT files, which Scribus can import with styles and formatting (mostly) intact.

Unfortunately, margins cannot be imported that way, so you need to re-create them manually in 1.4.x.



HTH,


Christoph