Standard practice for having external proofreaders

[rolf.sievers]

Hi,

I just created a brochure for an event. During this 16 different versions (of the PDF) were send around by email. Corrections where returned as written plaintext or annotated pdfs which I then merged into the Scribus file by hand. As that is about to happen again, I'd like to know:

Is there a nicer way to handle (possibly asynchronous) corrections of the text by (several) other people? How do you handle it in your projects?

[GarryP]

Try having a look at the various cloud storage solutions that are available. For instance, Google Drive https://www.google.co.uk/drive/

Many of them have collaboration tools built in that might be useful, and plenty of third-party companies produce other tools for them.

Once everyone is happy with the text in the cloud you can then import it into Scribus and apply your formatting.

(Cloud solutions also allow you to get round the mixed-platform problem.)

[rolf.sievers]

I was hoping to mix formating and editing of the text. I.e. texts are added one by one as time progresses. The last texts arrive one day before the whole thing has to be printed. (Actually, a day after :-P)

I am considering writing a set of scripts for structured text export / import against a human readable (non scarry) plaintext format. But before I put work into implementation, I'd like to ask if that already exists somewhere. Collaboratively editing such a document would be easy.

[GarryP]

Unfortunately Scribus doesn't have any collaboration functions, and I can't see it getting any in the short-to-medium-term future.

Some advice, for what it's worth, would be to:
* Create the Scribus document with sample text and images.
* Create a "standard text file" in the cloud with preferred paragraph styles already created.
* Accumulate/edit text and images in the cloud.
* Export text from the cloud, when ready, as ODT.
* Import ODT text into Scribus; substituting paragraph styles as needed.
* Import images when ready.
* Perform final editing and clean-up.

I know it's not ideal but it's a fairly simple procedure.

Having said that, maybe someone else has a better idea or can point you towards some import scripts.

P.S. Scribus doesn't - as of 1.4.4 - allow importing of character styles, only paragraph styles. And any bold formatting will be lost on import because of how Scribus handles fonts.