[scribus] Editing a book, any hints or gothchas?

[John Culleton]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2015 13:26:28 +0100
"a.l.e" <ale.comp_06 at xox.ch> wrote:

> hi
> >   
> >>   Unfortunately, you can only set Automatic
> >> text frames when you create a new document.
> >> The workaround might be to create a new one
> >> and import your pages from the old one if
> >> you've already started.
> > Is there any technical reason why it isn't
> > possible to enable automatic text frames
> > after a document have been created? Or is it
> > just a matter of lack of developer time for
> > that feature?
> >
> 
> in my eyes, it should only be possible to set
> it in the document settings and not in the new
> file dialog.
> 
> who thinks about it, when creating the file?
>


Well I do. 

But bowing to the current feature set I have just
broken the customer-supplied pdf file into
chapter segments via pdftk. Than as needed I will
extract the text into individual text files from
each such segment. Here is my script for the
extractions:
-----------------------------
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A27-44 output chapter_2.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A48-77 output chapter_3.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A78-99 output chapter_4.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A100-115 output chapter_5.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A116-161 output chapter_6.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A162-185 output chapter_7.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A186-198 output append.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A199-200 output ack.pdf
pdftk A=jan25.pdf cat A201-208 output index.pdf
---------------------------------------------
Since the customer uses roman numbers for the
frontmatter I had to determine the page ranges by
scanning the original pdf in okular and noting
the true page numbers for each chapter head.
pdftk doesn't work on page numbers but on true
page order disregarding numeration.

I had a similar script for extracting the
contents of each pdf chapter etc. subfile into a
text file. These text subfiles are useful in both
scribus and the context version of TeX.





-- 
John Culleton
Wexford Press
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