[scribus] Tables in 1.5.6svn

[Gregory Pittman]

On 1/8/20 3:28 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jan 2020 09:09:53 -0500
> Gregory Pittman <gpittman at iglou.com> dijo:
> 
>>> Now if I can find a tutorial on other options for the syntax. Like
>>> line thickness and color, font styles, and lots more. I'll look
>>> around the net - surely I can find something.
> 
>> One thing I would warn you about is that the font rendering, when you
>> look at the final PDF generated by Scribus, is distinctly inferior in
>> Render frames. In particular, comparing a PDF generated from LaTeX
>> outside of Scribus to using a render frame, it looks pretty shabby to
>> me.
> 
> I've spent hours on this so far and, adding your observation above,
> I've come to the conclusion that the only way to do tables in Scribus
> is the Writer > PDF > Scribus method that I have always used. It's
> clunky and inconvenient, but it works.
> 

Playing around a bit, I came up with this method, which we might call a "poor-man's table".

For example, say you want a table of 3 columns and 4 rows. First, make a text frame which is a rough guess of some sort of useful size for your cells.
Now, from the menu Item > Multiple Duplicate, set up 3 columns, 4 rows, no gaps. Now you have a 3x4 "table", with the cells all the same size. 
So you begin to enter text into individual frames. You see that the middle cell of the top row is not big enough. Select all the cells, then pull the tag in the middle of the bottom of these selected frames (they're not grouped, but you can still stretch and shrink them collectively).
Enter text into the second row, and you see that the middle row is too tall. Now, select all cells but except for the top row, then shrink them so that the second row looks good.
Similarly, go to the 3rd row, enter text, then if adjustment needed, only select the 3rd and 4th rows for adjustment.
Finally, do the 4th row adjustment as needed.

By analogy, you can use this same method for adjusting the width of columns, starting by selecting all, adjust; then the 2nd and 3rd columns, adjust, then just the 3rd column alone and adjust.
Doing this by this process keeps the cells together and keeps the X-Pos, Y-Pos of the upper left corner of the pseudo-table in the same place, but you can certainly select all and reposition the table on the page.

Time can be saved, of course, by using Paragraph styles to easily set each cell the same.

It's a bit unfortunate that we don't seem to have access to the "Welding" functions under Item -- this could be very handy.

Greg