* James Gilmore <james.d.gilmore at gmail.com> [2007-03-15 22:58:05 -0500]:
> I know this is getting long--I'll try to wrap up. One last option, if > importing and exporting docbook is just too problematic, is creating a new > format for scribus with similar functionality to the docbook DTD but with > the purpose of injecting itself into scribus with styles/kerning/etc. set, > creating bibs/etc. as Docbook parsers do, autogenerating textboxes where > needed. The only reason I can see doing this rather than simply using a > docbook file, though, is for naming styles. James, Right now the person most involved with the scribus work that directly touches on the new file format is avox. He might have something to add to this. Anyway, when we were having discussions about the design of the new file format that's recently begun making its way into 1.3.4cvs separation of the layout and content was one of the main points. The work I've done in sketching out the new valid xml format with the corresponding DTD was based on those discussions. You can see some of the preliminary stuff in the "dtd" directory of the cvs source namely scribus.dtd and scribus13.xml test file. Right now the task is for avox to finish creating the new text/paragraph style engine that would use some of the new file format's capabilities. Hopefully, sooner rather then later more will be incorporated along with the evolution of the file format itself as the discussions like the recent threads on the ML will give us ideas. Anyway, one of the thoughts I held closely to my heart as I was working on the dtd sketches was fine granularity of the document content, so if there were collaborative work to be done then changes could be done by independent editors down at least the level of paragraph and text styles would be separate from the layout concept of canvas, pages, containers (text and image frames, tables, etc.). So, the team has been thinking about this issue. I guess we should take a closer look at the docbook to see what concepts we could incorporate to make preparation of the larger documents with footnotes and TOCs and such more streamlined and amenable to a CMS-based workflow. Cheers, Alex.
