Getting Scribus and Word to get along

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grobbins

I've recently begun using Scribus 1.4 in an effort to combine two previously-separated MS Word Documents.  I have a document (let's call it a workbook), and a second document (let's call it the Instructor's Manual), and I want to combine them, so that the new Instructor's Manual has the Instructor's info on the left page, and then the actual Workbook page on the right.  The issue is that there is a lot of formatting to the workbook, on almost every page; columns, text in boxes, pull quotes, bulleted lists, and font styles.

If I copy all of this text into Scribus, I lose all of that formatting that was done in MS Word. Because I want the Instructor's manual to show the workbook page exactly as it is, this means that I have to format every single page (of 170) in Scribus to match the original, and I'm not even making any changes to it from the original.  This is a ton of work that seems unnecessary.

So, I first tried to Print Screen the word page, and copy that into an Image Frame in Scribus, but the Resolution is pretty bad, and trying to adjust the Resolution in Image Properties didn't make things any better; it just shrunk my image.

I then tried to print the page from the Word Doc to a PDF, and Import the PDF into an Image Frame, but the resolution was still an issue, and adjusting the resolution just shrunk the image.

So, I'm kind of at a loss with ideas.  I want to use Scribus, because it makes bringing the text from the two documents on side-by-side pages infinitely easier than it ever would be in MS Word, but I don't have the time, patience, or sanity to re-do 170 pages in Scribus. Is there anyway to do what I'm talking about, which is essentially getting an exact copy of a page from an MS Word Document into a page of Scribus, without losing any formatting?

Thank you so much for your help!!

Nermander

#1
Open the Word documents in Open/Libre Office Writer, that will retain the formatting.

When you used the PDF approach, did you try to export to PDF? Scribus will use a low resolution image for the preview.

Meho R.

Just to add to what Nermander said about PDF approach, when you're exporting to PDF from Scribus, tick "Embed PDF & EPS files" checkbox, so that those included PDFs do not get rasterized during the Scribus' PDF generation. In other words, with "Embed PDF & EPS" checked, all text from your original PDFs included via Image Frames will remain text in the final PDF output, meaning that the resulting PDF will be searchable, which might be important to you,

grobbins

So, it seems you two have helped to get me on the right track. I've been able to pull out each page as a separate PDF, and can then import into the Image Frames. After I exported to a pdf, the text was certainly much better.  This is the route that I plan to take, and has made this possible.

However, Meho R. talked about ticking "Embed PDF & EPS Files" checkbox during the export to PDF. My first attempt, that worked fine. However, on subsequent export to PDF attempts, when I have that box ticked, those pages come out blank in the resulting PDF.  I liked the text clarity that option seemed to give the end result, but now it's not working.

Any thoughts?  Thanks again for your help!

grobbins

I should add that I've tried this out importing PDFs that are both 1.4 and 1.5 (after reading something about 1.4 having transparency issues?), but the result is the same.