[scribus] script to convert e-mail and web addresses to PDF links

[Gary Dale]

New to Scribus scripting and because of the version of Scribus and 
Ghostscript I'm running, exporting to PDFs is a pain. I have to save the 
.sla file then fire up my laptop, which is running an older version of 
Debian, to create the PDF. Debian/Buster has a problem with importing 
postscript & PDFs and with creating PDFs.

However the far larger problem I'm currently having is that I have a 
hundred-page document with hundreds of e-mail addresses and a lot of web 
addresses that I'd like to automatically locate and create external 
links for. Doing this by hand will take forever.

After manually creating a few then looking at the .sla file, I note that 
the PDF links are, as expected, not really associated with the text. 
Instead, as the create sequence implies, they are associated with a bit 
of real estate on the page that (hopefully) aligns with some underlying 
text or image.

This suggests that a script would need to:

1) seek e-mail addresses (identified by text that looks like an e-mail 
address),

2) identify the position and size of the address on the page,

3) create a PDF link element with that address.

Has anyone seen / used such a script or something similar that I can 
work from?

Thanks for any assistance.