Importing document with correct bold, italic etc. fonts

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harryHawkey

Hello, just tried out Scribus for the first hour.  It's...not as annoying as I expected.  In fact, slightly less annoying than my first hours with InDesign or QuarkXpress.  But not much less!

Anyway, I want to import some nicely formatted document (doc, rtf, basically something with bold and italicised text (crikey, adding bold and italic is about a billion times easier on this forum than the actual program!  Madness!). 

So how can I import the document as it is, with all the flashy bold and italic stuff still intact, hopefully all in the same fonts and font sizes I created it in?

And while I'm here....(why) do I need to do stuff like justify, align text and change to bold/italic fonts in a separate editor window(that doesn't give me any clue whatsoever really what it will actually look like)? 

And...ah, that'll do for now.  Thanks for reading my moany message!

Nermander

It is hard to do, one reason is that Bold and Italic isn't a style setting in Scribus, it has to be acheived by changing the font.

Most other programs can do "fake" bold and italics, Scribus won't do that.

There is work in progress but I haven't had a look at it in Scribus 1.5 so others will have to fill in on how much easier it has gotten.

harryHawkey

Quote from: Nermander on July 12, 2015, 01:15:59 PM

Most other programs can do "fake" bold and italics, Scribus won't do that.


Hmm.  Not too sure what the word "won't" means in this context.  A bit of googling suggests that the programmers are in the grip of some sort of insane ideology which means they simply "don't like" fake bold and italics.  Is this correct?

I suppose it doesn't make much difference anyway.  Oh well...thanks for the reply (shuffles off miserably)

a.l.e

no, you're not 100% correct.
it's not the programmers that do not like the fake bold and italic.

it's the print shops ("printers") that don't like them. and -- for somehow obvious reasons -- tend not to be able to print them correctly.

people wanting a good quality in their print (when professionally printed, of course... not through your home perinter...) also tend to see the difference between a good italic (or bold) and an automatic generated one.

for those reasons, the scribus team does not like them either. but it's not a dogmatic thing.

on the other side, scribus could do a "best effort" and recognize in most cases what italic or bold are... it's not even hard to program it, but it takes some time to get it right...

harryHawkey

Thanks for that.  Yeah, it'd be nice if it would just fake 'em anyway and let me worry about stuff like that years or decades later (or never) .  Then I could just search and replace the fakes with actual bold fonts or whatever.

Great to hear that the Scribus team are not dogmatic.

Nermander

The problem with a fake bold or italic is that it depends on the font how it should be made. There is no general algoritm that works 100% for all fonts.

If you accept fake bold and italic it means you don't recognize the effort put into the design of a typeface.

Here is a good page showing some of the problems http://alistapart.com/article/say-no-to-faux-bold


a.l.e


harryHawkey

Interesting look at faux-font woes on that link.  The only trouble with this kind of must-obey-standards-compliance-at-all-costs approach is that it prevents me doing stuff I want to do now.  For example, right now on my little project I couldn't care less whether the fonts are a bit dodgy.  Conversely, I am extremely concerned that the document tells me exactly where the bold fonts are.  So basically, I cannot use the program for this (probably fairly unorthodox and unsupported) task, and I can't see any way to fix it.

I mean, say I'm using times new roman in ms word.  I highlight a word, click the 'b' button and hooray it's bold.  Now apparently, according to scribus, this is not the same as a distinct font called 'times new roman bold' and it imports the whole lot as more or less plaintext.

Grr.

a.l.e

as written before: it's not about standards compliance, but about avoiding you a big deception if scribus applies a fake bold or italic, you don't notice it (for any reason) and you get back from your printer hundreds of printed copies of your book with unreadable (or hard to read) italic.

manually choosing a font variant is typical (or at least was typical) for layout programs, that's probably the main reason why scribus still does not have a B and I button.

but, as you say, there is a need for such a button. it should not apply fake bolds and italics, but have an heuristic to find out if the current font has a bold or italic variant (and most do have!).
and possibly offer a way to manually define such a relationship, too.

if you just want to do it in a best effort way, for the most common cases, it's rather simple to implement (if i'm not mistaking i have code that does the contrary: find out if a given text in scribus is italic or bold).

if you implement it right (and i can give you hints on what could be a good way to implement it), i'm sure that the team would be very happy to accept patches for it!

it's not a solution for right now. sadly, such a solution does not exist... right now.

trebor

Importing text with bold and Italic has worked for me.

I'm using 1.5.1svn in Linux Mint 17 & Libre Office 4.2.8.2

These are the settings that worked.
Files of type: OpenDocument Text Documents (*.odt)
Importer: Automatic
Encoding UTF-8

If I selected the 'OpenDocument/TextDocument' or 'OpenOffice.org Writer Documents' importers rather than 'Automatic' I lost the Italics & Bold. Therefore I am not entirely sure which importer is being activated when selecting Automatic.

The key to successfully importing styled text is to set up styles in your original document. Due to the automatic styles created in every new document it is problematic if styles have been applied when you are not aware. I find that when using documents originally created in M$ Word then translated to '.odt' many styles come across to Scribus.

However most are spurious and the delete style option is very useful as you can convert these to the styles you use in Scribus.

When I import the Italics & Bold the first step is to convert this formatted text into a character style you have previous set up in your Scribus document. This style will naturally use a proper font that has a Bold or Italics version.