The way it is done today is quite abstruse. Yes, indeed. Figuring out the path from Docbook to print is frustrating. Particularly because there's not clear documentation that I've found for getting DocBookNG (the newest incarnation of DocBook) to pdf. I'm not convinced there's tools to do it yet, in fact.
I'd love to see scribus handle xml in the editor. And make smart decisions based on tags. I want to be able to tag words using docbook, and when I build my index in scribus, it looks for those tags and builds the index based on what page the word ended up on, with hyperlinks between the word and the index within the pdf. I want scribus to be smart enough to see a <sidebar> tag and know as it's building the page from the docbook source that it needs to put all the text from the sidebar tag into it's own frame, on that page. I could go on, but you probably get the idea. All these things could be (fairly easily) scripted, if Scribus only kept the xml tags within the text. I don't really know how difficult it would be to implement in scribus, because I haven't delved into the code. Consider: If I'm right, and there's no working toolchain to get from the latest implementation of DocBook to print, then implementing an importer that makes intelligent decisions (assigning text to appropriately named frames, attaching titles to the Table of Contents, building a bibliography/index/glossary/etc. similarly to the way it builts TOCs, and hyperlinking tags to/from the appropriate places as far as bibs and index go) would position Scribus as THE toolchain for DocBook, from now into the forseeable future. Scribus truly needs to be xml aware. It doesn't need to format the text, but it needs to be aware of the kinds of semantics that DocBook is aware of, and generally _keep_ inline xml tags, as a minimum. As for database connectivity, I'm all for it, but having scribus be semantically aware of what kind of data it's holding, if only so it can be manipulated by scripts, is many, many orders of magnitude more useful and important, in my opinion. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/attachments/20070320/6a0adbc8/attachment.html
