Text Styles Frustration

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Timbow

I need to learn this Styles thing if I am going to get consistent results through a big document, so to try to test the program and teach myself I start with a new Open Office Writer Document, and arrange some text in four styles, save them as custom Paragraph styles and save the file.

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Timbow

Then I open Scribus 1.4 make a new document fill the single page with a text frame do GET TEXT and put in my document. Here I start to get unexpected results. The TITLE Style has come over fine but the SUBEADING Style is just the same as default text. FIRSTPARA looks alright but  IMPACT has problems. No worries I will open the Scribus Style Manager and take a look. (tbc)

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Timbow

In the Style Manager I change the font for SUBHEADING to gill and italic, click APPLY but nothing happens. In fact afaict I can't alter the styles at all in Style Manager. It looks like I am selecting the new font but it never alters the document and doesn't show in the Text editor window.

Is this normal program behaviour?

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a.l.e

the story editor is an editor without formatting!

it's the idea behind it!

for now, the style manager manages the styles but does not apply them... i think this will have to change in the future... but that's the way it works now.

depending on the type of document you're editing you should forget about the story editor, work on your text in the frame itself and use the properties palette (in the "window" menu) to format your text.

hope that helps
a.l.e


Nermander

So, the solution is to not make the styles "inheriting" but make all styles with full/complete attributes?

Timbow

Thank you all. Really good to know that I am neither a numpty nor mad. I would really appreciate a little more input here because I have a deadline looming. Briefly my project is the writing, preparation and publication of a little paperback guidebook which I hope to do with Scribus.

My first deadline is to prepare a pdf prototype of this book for a range of purposes. It is to confirm that I can bring the project to completion, identifying any likely stumbling blocks. It is a first draft design for the look, layaout and arrangement of the pages. It is an outline plan of the contents, chapters, headings etc.. It is part of an application for funding to elevate the project from a diy effort to a product of a professional standard.

What is slightly stressing me is that so far I am unable to answer the fundamental question which I will have to put to you experts:

What is the best way to set up Styles to arrange and format text, and how should it be imported?

Please note this _must_ be done with editable Styles like a CSS for html because I need to be able to alter say all 20 chapter headings at once if I decide they should be underlined, bold whatever. Scribus has this functionality I believe. It looks to me now like I should be importing plain text because formatted text is going to cause untold complications with missing fonts, incompatible format and the unalterable styles bug, but this is quite contrary to previous advice here that I should use a Word Processor right up to the final stage, in fact that I should use a Word Processor to prepare two lines of text for a business card even.

So what is the best way to do it?

With fullsome thanks in advance, and apologies if I am sounding a bit stressed and demanding.

Tim W

Meho R.

@ale, I'm unable to compile latest build of 1.4.0 to see if the fix provided by jghali (see the link in my previous post) is going to make it into the final, 1.4.0 version. The version from repos (Debian/Ubuntu, 1.4.0.rc5) doesn't include it ATM. Can you test it, just to be sure?

@Timbow, importing styles is a logical and IMHO preferred method of keeping things consistent and simple . As you can see from jghali's comment in the bug report above, things are as they are at the moment, devs are aware of this style importing issue and future versions (hopefully final 1.4.0) will have this sorted out. At the moment, note that only things related to character settings of styles imported in Scribus do not work, meaning you should plan ahead and set correct fonts and formatting in OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice. If some of fonts do not appear in Scribus, then it's better you don't use them at all, since Scribus is very picky about quality of fonts.

I personally use plain text and do formatting in Scribus directly, at least for now, until style importing issue gets solved completely.

P.S. Did you try Scribus 1.5.0?

a.l.e

scribus 1.5 is not meant for mortal users... not yet...

Wena

Am I not a mortal then, a.l.e?? I do use 1.5 to do front covers, but that is off the topic.

I look forward to the solution of this problem.

Wena

Meho R.

Quote from: Wena on October 16, 2011, 01:03:16 PM
Am I not a mortal then, a.l.e?? I do use 1.5 to do front covers, but that is off the topic.

I look forward to the solution of this problem.

Wena
Compiling the latest 1.4 or 1.5 dev version might be the solution ;)

a.l.e

compiling 1.5 makes you immortal... or killsl you :-)


however, i'm not aware of the fact that 1.5 would have better .odt import than 1.4...

Meho R.

Just an update: Scribus 1.4.0.rc6 contains jghali's patch, so importing styles and changing them in Scribus works better now. However, there is still issue with character stlyes: they do not get imported, so for italics/bold/bold italics one must use direct formatting in LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org instead of using character styles. But there's another thing: when an imported style is changed in Scribus, all words bearing direct formatting do not get updated automatically, so keep an eye on those.

Wena

Thank you Meho R. that's good news, when I start on the next job I will update to 1.4,6.

Wena