[scribus] updating positions by editing positions

[Gary Dale]

On 2018-10-29 07:12 PM, Gary Dale wrote:
> One of the things I hate about Scribus is that it seems to duplicate 
> styles on a whim. In one document I'm currently working on, it created 
> 40 copies of the styles. One of the things I like about it is that I 
> can fix this with a text editor by removing the duplicated styles 
> directly then saving the file. This is a lot faster than removing them 
> using the style delete dialogue.
>
> I have a document that I need to make multiple changes to the 
> positions and widths of numerous text objects - the same changes for 
> each of hundreds of objects that I could presumably do directly by 
> editing the .sla file. However when I look at the object positions, 
> the numbers don't make sense.
>
> For example, a 136mm x 7mm text object that is located 9mm from the 
> left margin and 7mm from the top of the page shows as 
> XPOS="125.512611023622" YPOS="1343.85051968504" 
> WIDTH="385.511811023622" HEIGHT="19.8425196850394".
>
> Another 24mm x 28mm object 5mm lower shows as XPOS="125.512611023622" 
> YPOS="1358.0237480315" WIDTH="68.0314960629921" 
> HEIGHT="79.3700787401575".
>
> From the width & height, and the offset for the second object, it 
> appears that the internal unit is around 0.3mm but where do the XPOS 
> and YPOS numbers come from?
>

I received an off-list reply from Bert that says that Scribus uses 1/72" 
points internally. Again, this confirms the figures that I get for the 
width & height of the objects.

However the positions are as I described them and the margins are 6mm 
all around (a little less than 1/4"). If taken from the edge of the 
paper, the 9mm left position which shows as 125.5... should be more like 
25 points and the YPOS, which seems to be increasing as objects move 
down the page, should be even smaller.

I know I've got the correct objects from their content and from the 
OwnPage attribute. I also checked another object on another page (page 
0) and got similar results, except the XPOS and YPOS weren't totally 
wacky. I expect to see about 2.83 mm per internal unit. For OwnPage 2 
objects, the XPOS was 13.9 while the YPOS were 191.9 and 113.9. On 
OwnPage 0, the XPOS was 4.2 and the YPOS was 2.93.

Can anyone provide any insight into how the XPOS and YPOS numbers are set?