On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 18:57, Craig Ringer wrote: [snip] > OTOH, I don't see how an importer can be created that can do a > trustworthy and reliable import of an undocumented binary format like > Quark's or Microsoft's. The OpenOffice folks have enough trouble with MS > Word, and it doesn't have to import sub-millimetre perfect positioning > and complex type adjustments. Importing an ad wrong and not realising is > even worse than having to re-do the ad, IMHO. > > What might be useful, though, is something that could just import the > text content from Quark and InDesign documents, producing a set of > frames in a temporary scrapbook that could be positioned and styled > appropriately.
[snip] > > I guess in the end, a user changing apps would just have to bite the > bullet, re-do their templates, and make the jump. [snip] couple of things about this thread struck me, and my response to this: 1) scribus should work towards making its fileformat (xml incarnation?) the de facto industry standard. 2) but scribus is a software, it can't do that. people can do that. so we need to make the scribus fileformat a standard. let that be used for inter-oping from one page-layout to another. [i know this is far more complex, but the journey of a thousand clicks....] 3) it is often far easier to have your legacy archive recreated rather than imported, into a new app. one-off pages are okay, but whole decades of it, and that too during a deadline crush...? otoh, no digital archive is alive beyond 3 to 5 years due to incompatible or no-longer-supported file versions. i know a *lot* of publishers who are hopping mad who have books to be redone because pagemaker 3 is not supported today, or corel ventura disappeared.... this is an interesting challenge, i have no solution, but from the looks of it, opensource, open fileformats, open standards, open methodologies, seem to point to the answer. this is where scribus comes in. :-) LL
