Bold and Italic- an easier way to manage them in large bodies of text?

Previous topic - Next topic

Karela

So here it is: I am working on a large programme book for a music festival, and there are SO MANY places where I need to use bold and italics that I feel like my title should be changed from "graphic designer" to "bold and italics manager". Every list of concert pieces needs all the composers names in bold, all the non-English words in italics (that would be most of them) and then each concert has 500 words of programme notes in which there are, on average, another 20 words or phrases to be put in italics.

All of these have been carefully put in to a text document by the proofreader, and when I copy-paste into Scribus, they all have to be carefully put in by me all over again.

Question #1: Must it be this way? Is there no way to import the text with bold and italic still in place?

If not, I must put them in myself, but I can not use the keyboard commands that I know (cmd+b, cmd+i).

Question #2: Are there other commands I don't know about? Anything to avoid having to mouse swipe and click because 4-5 mouse mouvements vs one mouse movement and keyboard command is quite literally killing my wrist.

Any other advice on managing these sort of issues is much appreciated!


Nermander

This is a well known problem with Scribus and one reason is that Scribus only uses "true" bold and italics, which means they can only be made by changing the font. Another reason is that the import filters only could handle paragraph styles.

There have been improvements in later versions but I haven't used the later versions enough to tell if there is a good solution for you.

GarryP

Unfortunately there's no way to apply styles via shortcut keys. If you could then one of your problems would be sort of solved but not the main one of formatting going missing.

As Nermander has mentioned, Scribus handles fonts differently to most word processing software which - normally - manipulate the glyphs of a font to create "bold" and "italic" versions on-the-fly rather than using the proper bold and italic variants of the font. Scribus forces you to do it the "proper" way but unfortunately doesn't give you a quick way of doing it properly.

There are keyboard shortcuts for some style functions (Preferences / Keyboard Shortcuts / Styles) but I can't get them to work for me. Maybe I'm using them wrong. (There's even one for "Other" which is a bit odd.)