Importing text with formatting

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marcel.uhrin

Hi, previously typesseting scientific journal (e.g. in PageMaker or InDesign) it was ussually possible import basic text / character formatting made already in word processor (e.g. italic for animal names, caputal letters, bold formatting). Is it possible also in Scribus?

Meho R.

You can import some of the formatting done in a word processor if you used OpenDocument format (or .odt, default document format for OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice) as a source. So, you could try the following:
1. Install LibreOffice (which is free), open your office document (.doc?) and save it as an ODT file
2. Create a text frame in Scribus, right click on it > Get text > locate and select your ODT file > uncheck "Import text only" option and press OK.

Note that while Scribus can import paragraph styles, it ignores character styles, so you'll have to make sure all bold and italic words are direct formatting in the ODT file, not generated automatically by applying character styles.

midiguru

Meho's suggestion sort of halfway works, but it's not really working. I can import text in .odt format to a new text box, and it will retain the italicization of certain words, as desired -- but when I select all the text in the new box, copy it, and paste it into my real text frame, the paragraph breaks are lost!

I'm going to sternly resist the temptation to be sarcastic here. I've just discovered Scribus, and it seems to be exactly what I need. I appreciate the hard work that the developers have put into it! All the same, italicized words in a novel are not really a very esoteric item. I'm surprised that import of text that includes italics seems to be such a troublesome thing.

GarryP

midiguru, many people have asked for the retention of character styles through the import process. As you say, some formatting - such as italicizing words - is a very common thing. One big problem is that most word processors don't do typography properly like Scribus does.

For instance, if you make a character/word italic - or bold - in a basic word processor the software creates new altered versions of the glyphs rather than using the real italic/bold typeface variants. Specifically, for italicized characters the software just draws the glyphs on a slant (oblique) and for bold they typically increase the outline width. (Sloppy, but for the average document it doesn't look too bad.)

Scribus doesn't do this; it forces you to use the correct typeface variant. This means that if you don't have the italic or bold variant installed then it can't display the character correctly. So, if you don't have, for example, "Arial Italic" installed then Scribus can't display italicized characters, therefore the character formatting can't be kept.

It's not an ideal situation but there's no simple way of making sure that the imported text will look that same when it comes into Scribus. Maybe that will change by the time the next stable version comes out.