Hi.
I layout a scientific publication with not-so-many articles per year. For context, scientific articles are structured texts written/edited by external authors in their word-processors (usually .doc or .docx), some figures and tables with their captions and lists of formatted references/bibliography. Articles fit within a fixed set of few sections with a rather spartan design. Another article: iterate. Three things are crucial:
- to keep a consistent design (master pages, styles)
- to layout ilustrations among text easily (frames), and
- to fully preserve (e.g., italics, subscripts, symbols) and layout (hyphenation, columns) text.
I've been hoping to move my complete workflow to open source since
years. I've been working with Ubuntu Linux, Open/LibreOffice and Gimp since 2011, but I am still stuck building everything with PageMaker 6.5 (can you believe it?

) running in a WindowsXP guest (in a virtual machine). Now a small window of opportunity opened and I decided to finally make the move to Scribus!

However…

After some weeks of reading and trying (forum, email list, Mantis tracker, articles, manuals, wiki) I still cannot find a way to get text into frames and styles without losing all the work that have gone into building it in the first place, i.e., italics, sub/superscripts or small caps! I cannot afford to not only apply styles and manually check hyphenation but also to recover every subscript or italic that went there. It is a bit dangerous too. Nor I can move every author to use some particular markup codes instead of the "normal way" (like it or not) which would facilitate some import script.
I tried getting text from .doc/.odt and also .html, which seems to better preserve markup, but it all dissapear anyway when a Scribus (paragraph) style is applied. I found so many bugs reported through time (e.g., #477 in 2004, #9989 in 2011, #10661 in 2012, #12800 in 2014, #14916 in 2017…) and even reasonable solutions to the problem (several subordinated character styles for a paragraph style created when importing, I think in the email list from 2004!!!) that I cannot get how it was not fixed yet, as if it was some kind of optional feature. [rant] I know: "proper" italics vs "false" italics, "semantics" vs "appeareance", whatever... But how can Scribus be a "mature DTP" if it is (still) unable to properly import (formatted) text, which is the backbone of desktop publishing? That should have been the first task to accomplish, particularly because the (standard) recommendation is to do the heavy work on text (correcting, formating) previously in a word processor! [/rant] Sorry: I think I built so much hope for Scribus in all this time that now I feel really dissapointed…
Back to the point. Anyone can provide any solution/idea? Have anyone been able to put Scribus into a desktop publishing workflow that has (previously formatted) text as main input?
Thank you (and sorry, again…)