[scribus] Importing Pages with Text Frame Chain

[Matt Miller]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022, at 13:12, Craig Bradney wrote:
> Hi Matt
>
> I am not sure what you are trying to achieve however I don’t think we 
> have built the scripter functions to support this. I think it exist in 
> the GUI as we have the menu item:  Item, Text Frame Links, Unlink and 
> break chain.

In 1.5.8 and 1.5.9svn I see "Item | Text Frame Links | Unlink Text Frames and Cut Text," but I'm not sure what that does. I tried it once, and I didn't see that it did what I was hoping. I guess what I was hoping for is to remove or break a text frame chain without disturbing the placement of the text. In other words, can I take advantage of a text frame chain to layout a long piece of text across multiple pages and get it looking just right, but then after that, when editing is done, can I convert the document to a chain-free document where the text is fixed in each frame? If "Unlink Text Frames and Cut Text" is supposed to do that, then I would be interested in spending some time learning how to help get that functionality into the scripter.

Note that I've haven't compiled trunk since it went to QT6.

As far as my overall goal with all this, my use case is maintaining collections of documents. Mainly I'm building versions of each of the sixty-six books of the Bible in multiple page sizes and point sizes. Then, for each page size and point size, I have a single large document that collects all sixty-six books into a single Bible. There's no change of page layout when the individual books are collected into the Bible. Pages from the individual books are copied exactly into place. But, after a Bible has been created, my system does support editing of certain aspects of the individual books, and these edits need to then make it into the associated Bible. Regenerating the entire Bible can take a long time, so was trying to just replace individual pages. I have this page-level replacement working for the Bible PDFs (with the help of pdftk), but not yet for SLAs. My thinking is that if the SLAs were chain-free, then importPage() would work as expected for this use case.

Thanks for taking the time to think about this.


> Frames are just a place (single or a chain) to present a 
> Story of Text. A cursor selection can be placed over a text and then 
> the selection copied, again these functions may only be partially 
> represented in Scripter. Maybe it will work. The cmdtext.cpp function 
> contains the code.
>
> Also, not sure if you mentioned earlier, but what version of Scribus 
> are you using?
>
> Thanks
> Craig
>
> On 18/04/2022, 17:20, "Matt Miller" <matt.miller at fastmail.com> wrote:
>
>     I'm still struggling with this, and it seems one reason is that I 
> want to take advantage of text frame chains to initialize documents 
> from text files, but when I'm editing existing documents the text frame 
> chain is often getting in the way. So, how would I get rid of the frame 
> chain after I've used it to help layout a new document?
>
>     Thanks.
>
>
>     On Sat, Apr 16, 2022, at 11:22, Matt Miller wrote:
>     > I'm trying use importPage() to replace selected pages with pages 
> from 
>     > another document, but the document I'm importing from uses a text 
> frame 
>     > chain. It seems that since the text in the other document is 
> associated 
>     > with a frame chain and not with any particular frame, I'm not 
> able to 
>     > import a page from somewhere in the middle of the other document 
> and 
>     > get in my new document the text that would show in that page of 
> the 
>     > other doc. As far as I can tell from the XML it's not stored in 
> the 
>     > .sla what text is in each frame, but all the text of the entire 
> chain 
>     > is just stored as a single piece of text.
>     >
>     > I'm thinking of opening the other document, using getFrameText() 
> to 
>     > copy from the desired page of the other document, then using 
>     > insertText() to paste into my new document, But each page could 
> have 
>     > multiple frames to copy and paste from, so that's more complex 
> than a 
>     > page import. I'm wondering if there's some way to do this at the 
> page 
>     > level, without looping over all the objects on a page.
>     >
>     > Thanks.
>     >
>     >
>     > --
>     >
>     >   Matt Miller
>     >   mailto:matt.miller at fastmail.com
>     >
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>       Matt Miller
>       mailto:matt.miller at fastmail.com
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-- 

  Matt Miller
  mailto:matt.miller at fastmail.com