[scribus] page | import messes up formatting

[Gary Dale]

On 2018-11-18 5:22 p.m., JLuc wrote:
> Styles are not well managed during page import or copy'n'paste across 
> document
> or when scrapbook copying when the copied element comes from another 
> document that uses other style definitions
> (and it's one of the most annoying bugs : cf 
> https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11420 and 
> https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=11814 )
> Generaly speaking, best is to avoid copying or importing any element 
> or page from other document.
> Depending on your workflow there might be some workarounds.
>
> JLuc
>
You would think this would be one of those things that "just work". 
Unfortunately from the little I've seen of how Scribus works, importing 
a page actually means touching every element on that page.

I don't really understand the thinking behind the design decisions. An 
element's vertical position is taken from a spot before the start of the 
first page and pages exist within a larger "canvas" for no good reason 
so far as I can tell - except that the developers don't like negative 
numbers.

To me, it would make much more sense if frames were positioned on a page 
relative to its top left corner (being Eurocentric). Text and other 
objects that exist within frames shouldn't be touched by imports. All 
that should happen is that the frame's page number changes.

Styles should have a document attribute so that importing a page doesn't 
involve changing the style name. In my case that would look like the 
original default paragraph is still from the original document while the 
second document's default paragraph style would still be from the second 
document.

I'd like to see an easier method of reducing the number of styles as 
well though - a script that automatically locates identical styles and 
merges them down to one. Run that after an import to keep the document 
simple.

However I suspect this would take a substantial rewrite of what I can 
only assume is some very complicated code that currently has to change 
every element when pages are added, removed, imported, resized, etc.. 
I'm not surprised that it doesn't work every time. :(