[scribus] Get the width of a piece of text in a Scribus script?

[Gregory Pittman]

On 08/06/2016 10:04 AM, John Culleton wrote:
> On Fri, 09 Aug 2013 15:43:52 -0700
> Adam <adam at photosynth.ca> wrote:
> 
>> Good day,
>> I'm working on a script for laying out a song
>> book that includes lyrics and chords. Chord
>> names need to be placed above each line of
>> lyrics, at the appropriate spot in the lyrics.
>> I've explored a variety of approaches to this
>> using typographic options to try to get the
>> chord letters bumped up above the lyrics line
>> using baseline shift and kerning adjustments,
>> but so far these have not proved effective.
>>
>> My present approach is to put each chord in a
>> small text box above the lyrics line. In order
>> to do this, I need to be able to determine the
>> horizontal position of that point in the
>> lyrics, as rendered in the relevant font and
>> type size. Does anyone know of a way to do this?
>>
>> Apparently the ImageFont python module (which
>> is a subset of PIL, or the Python Imaging
>> Library), can return the width of a text line
>> as rendered, but I so far have not been able to
>> get this module working properly (there's a C
>> library involved, which is malfunctioning in my
>> installation).
>>
>> Does anyone know of any other way to
>> programatically measure the rendered width of a
>> line of text?
>>
>> Thanks for your help!
>>
>> Adam
>>
> There are horses for courses, as my father use to
> say. Consider laying out the songs using the free
> program Mup. Each output will be a postscript file
> that you can import into Scribus. There is some
> learning involved of course but you will find
> that the alignment of notes to verses is elegantly
> handled. You can also output midi files to
> play the music.
> 
> 
There is also lilypond, which can be used inside of Scribus in a Render
frame. Although there is an expectation that one would be adding a
musical score, plus lyrics, and maybe chords, I would think that it
would be possible to skip the score and just have lyrics and chords.

Perhaps someone on the list familiar with lilypond might give some help.

Greg