<div dir="ltr">I like a.I.e's perspective (because it's mine too!), but I don't know how much demand there might be. If you look at how much COM programming is happening to build MS Office documents via web interfaces, I would suggest that it is at least investigating.<div>
<br></div><div>I have realized that the source files of Scribus docs are just XML, and so any program can create and manipulate Scribus docs: this is trivial (in concept; the practice can be a fair bit of effort, as we can see with products like PHPWord). Like many others, I programmatically edit MS Word and MS Excel XML files regularly.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The missing link in this approach is printing: ultimately, nobody wants a Scribus file, they want a PDF or hardcopy, or whatever (same is true for Word, AutoCAD, etc). Any script or program can create a Scribus doc, or more likely case edit a template, but only Scribus knows how to convert the file into something viewable.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The BIG question: Can Scribus to read a Scribus document and output a PDF (say), without having to open Scribus into a GUI?</div><div><br></div><div>Regards<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 22 June 2012 11:15, a.l.e <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ale.comp_06@xox.ch" target="_blank">ale.comp_06@xox.ch</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">hi<div class="im"><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<<<br>
Ideally, they would enter the text for named portions of the document<br>
in a web interface (they do know how to surf), and we would have a<br>
backend that stuffs these into the correct slots in a template. But I<br>
do not see anything on this in the documentation.<br>
>><br>
<br>
depends on your needs, but most I've come across like this still needed an editor to make the document "presentable".<br>
In that respect it would not be too much more effort for the editor to "Get Text" from the contributors having emailed text or odt files (especially if they were named according to the named portion)?<br>
<br>
If you do have a lot of "named portions" then yes presumably it could be scripted relatively easily, like an expanded mail merge process. But obviously you would need to have some "rules" by which the contributors and scripts can live by.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
despite everybody telling him that he should do it manually -- and probably creating the content before working with scribus -- what he wants to do is probably fine and doable with scribus and some python scripting.<br>
<br>
and i'm pretty sure that this something people will want to do more and more!<br>
<br>
personally, i'm currently focused on usability and productivity with scribus 1.5svn... and it's coming along very well... but once this is done, i'd really like to work a bit on getting scribus to work with some external interfaces (as an example a web application, like he is asking!)<br>
<br>
there are some solution that are currently more mature for such a task (xml to pdf, latex, ...), but scribus should imo become a tool that supports distributed workflows<br>
<br>
have fun<br>
a.l.e<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
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