<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Dear Scribus Users,<br>
<br>
At the moment, I'm putting together some material for a blog post
about creating eBooks (ePub and Kindle) from Scribus and LyX. This
blog post is based on a talk I was going to give last year and never
had time to finish. (I got really interested in the whole thing
again after playing around with iBooks Author and wondering how hard
it would be to create similar books with open tools.)<br>
<br>
Right now, I'm pretty psyched because it seems like all of the bits
are present to really make beautiful things. However, they need some
gluing together. <br>
<br>
To that end, I'm going to write Python code so that Scribus can
export its styles as CSS and import an eBook style-sheet for
editing. The inability to design (rather than code) style sheets is
one of the biggest weaknesses in open eBook tools. Scribus already
has a fantastic styles editor, which I think can be adapted nicely
to this purpose. As I've started to experiment with options, I had a
couple of questions:<br>
<ol>
<li>Is there a guide to scripting with Scribus1.4? The only guide
I was able to find was quite old.</li>
<li>What about up to date documentation about render frames? I'm
hopeful that these can be used to create and insert dynamic
content (like HTML gallery widgets, models, and such).</li>
<li>Is there any way to access the Qt UI controls in Scribus via
the ScriptingNG interface? I know that this can be done on
Linux, because I experimented with it a while ago
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://blog.oak-tree.us/index.php/2010/08/25/scribus-dockwidgets">http://blog.oak-tree.us/index.php/2010/08/25/scribus-dockwidgets</a>).
But, as I understand it, Python ships its own interpreter on Mac
and Windows.</li>
<li>If you there isn't currently a way, would it be possible to
have you incorporate either PyQt or PySide so that it is
possible? This would allow for robust extensions to be created
that use the same UI components as Scribus does, instead of
TCL/TK.</li>
</ol>
If the experiments with CSS go well, my next step is to experiment
with exporting material to ePub3 documents (which offer much of the
HTML5/CSS3 goodness that Apple is borrowing for iBooks Author).
After looking at everything, I think it may be possible to create
templates for iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc. that are every bit as nice as
what iBooks Author puts out.<br>
<br>
But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Any input you can offer regarding
the questions above would be very welcome.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
<br>
Rob Oakes<br>
</body>
</html>