A couple weeks ago I began migrating my tabletop RPG rules from HTML to Scribus; currently 28 pages (of probably 130) into the migration. As a long, long time web developer, I now feel very spoiled with what can be done easily with HTML and CSS. I'm not saying DTP is hard, but I can see how tedious it can be. Most of this post is going to be about how to replicate some of those techniques. I'm currently using 1.4.3, but I have 1.5 installed.
I've got 16 Master Pages, 8 paragraph styles, and 6 character styles. Easy enough so far.
All my pages are single column. Most of the content is paragraphs, two levels of headline, and bulleted lists, with the occasional inset table.
Last night I went back and set up a TOC and sections (read: chapters) in the document.
Is there a way to add attributes to sections? There are two text frames in the header area of my master pages, the outside one is meant for chapter title. If I could put the chapter titles into a section attribute, I could then use the attributes to populate the header, TOC, and chapter title frames. I could also use a section number (1, 2, 3, ...) to feed into my table captions, i.e. "Table n-3: Lorem ipsum", and a section ordinal (i, ii, iii, etc, correlates to section number).
Is there a way to generate a multi-level TOC? There are only 13 chapters, but I'd like to beef up the TOC with indented lines for each top level headline.
So far I've been putting the body text into a single text frame (linked across pages, of course) and applying my normal and headline paragraph styles. Is there a more sophisticated way to do it?
Is it possible to give my headline paragraph styles graphical SVG underlines that span the full margin width? Could these be automated for left and right pages?
Is it possible to use an SVG as a bullet list image? None of my dingbat fonts have a glyph I really like, so I made one in Inkscape.
Is there a way to anchor frames to specific words/lines in another text frame? I'd like all my tables to move with their relevant paragraphs. Getting the tables nicely aligned to the top of a line would be nice also.
When the document is done, how would I set up additional generated portions like the TOC? Specifically, an index (entries linked to words/phrases in the body) and a list of tables (their captions and page numbers). Ah, I forgot to mention I also have a few graphical diagrams, which could be included in the table list.
Regarding paragraph lines and page breaks: is it possible when a headline leaves less than 2 or 3 lines of the following paragraph at the bottom of a page, to automatically break to the next page?
Making tables is by far the most tedious thing in Scribus. I have 53 now, ranging from small 3x2 to a gigantic 8x160 (it will probably span 4 pages). Because of how I want them to look and because I want their content to be natively editable in Scribus, I've just accepted that I have to stitch them together by hand. I've gotten very good a wielding the Alignment tools.