Importing .docx or .pages files in Scribus 1.4.6?

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JohnJR

Hi,

It seems there is some conflicting advice on the internet about importing these two file types in OS X 10.x, with regard to "filters".  Can you do this directly or still convert with LibreOffice first?

Thanks,

GarryP

JohnJR, Scribus can import .DOC but I'm not sure about .DOCX. I've just tried to import a random .DOCX file into 1.4.6 - I had to set the Get Text dialog to show all files - and told it to import as a Word Document. Nothing was imported. This might have just been a problem with my random document but the fact that .DOCX isn't shown in the list is telling.

.PAGES isn't in the list - in the list of file types in the Get Text dialog (on my Windows machine) - either so I've a feeling that they aren't allowed, but someone might have had some success (probably not though).

In general, if it's on the list you should be able to import, but if it isn't you probably won't be able to unless you get lucky.

The "trick" is to set the correct Importer in the dialog and that depends on the document you're trying to import. For example, say you have an .ODT file that contains HTML text (not an HTML file). Importing it as HTML, or an OpenOffice Writer document, or with Text Filters will all give you different results.

Some experimentation might be necessary to get things importing correctly but once you've got the right settings you can keep using them. If you have issues with a specific file that you can attach then I'm sure that people will be able to help you with it.

If in doubt, (and if possible) I would convert the file to an .ODT with Open/LibreOffice first. (I would not trust Word to make the conversion to .ODT. Use the software that uses the file type natively to do the conversion to the type you want.) That way, if you have problems with it, it will be easier for people to figure out what's going wrong since everyone has access to Open/LibreOffice without having to convert the .DOC(X) which might obscure the issue.

JohnJR

Hi GarryP,

Thanks for you reply.  I did manage to create an .odt file in LibreOffice and when I opened it I had a very pleasant surprise: page, font and size, spacing, numbering were preserved.  It was as if it was a photo of the .docx file--blank page spacing and all.

By the way, I'm using Mac OS X 10.11.6.

The text and font were maintained, but not the font sizes, line spacing, indents, drop caps, or justification.  But it did make an attempt, for instance thin lines and some point sizes.

I thought I could go into the imported text to correct these but could find no way to manipulate anything.  This is reasonably serious because some of the text is not on the right page while two pages of text wind up on the same page.

Can I, and How can I, correct these issues in Scribus?

Also I tried to just delete the imported text and re-import it.  The first time I was able to just edit "undo", but the second time I lost the ability to do this.  Rummaging around I did something that triggered a "crash warning--Signal 11" that stalled out all of Scribus, correctable only by Force Quitting Scribus.

As it is now the imported text is sitting there in my Scribus pages with no way to either delete it or edit it.

What can I do with either; delete or correct (edit)?

Thanks,

utnik

hi john

Quote from: JohnJR on March 08, 2017, 01:43:37 AM...but could find no way to manipulate anything.

...Can I, and How can I, correct these issues in Scribus?

i assume you're not working on the right layer. (but i could be wrong, there are more possibilities to save items from accidental changes. as often – hard to tell without the file...)

utnik

GarryP

JohnJR, I'm confused.

Essentially, I can't tell which software you're using at any particular point in time. The move from LO to Scribus isn't clear so I'm not sure how to diagnose what is happening.

You mention opening an .ODT file and having a pleasant surprise, but Scribus can't "open" files like that, it can only import stuff from them. Are you in Scribus at this point or in LO? If you're in LO then that's one thing but if you're in Scribus it's another.

For example: You mention that some formatting is preserved but other formatting isn't. This doesn't make sense. Converting a .DOCX to .ODT in LO will normally preserve all of the basic formatting, including line spacing, justification, etc. Importing text into Scribus will not preserve things like line spacing (unless you set-up the styles and do the import correctly). Also, I don't know what you mean by "thin lines" being preserved. Are these lines that have been drawn? They wouldn't be imported into Scribus so that doesn't sound right.

If you can give a step-by-step account - which application, what action you took, and what the result was - we can probably help you much better. As things currently stand, I have no idea what I'm trying to fix.

JohnJR

Hi Folks,

Sorry I left so much confusion in my questions.  It was the Word-to-LibreOffice conversion that went so well, I'm always sort of surprised when technology works.  The conversion was saved as an .odt.

I then returned to my Scribus file (a set set of applied master pages) and followed File > Import > Get Text to place the manuscript into the Scribus pages.  The manuscript appeared in the text frames but in odd spacings and pages and entirely justified to the left.  Sorry about my use of the term "thin lines"; they are a just decorous small font lines in title pages that I "draw" using the hyphen or underscore keys.

But Wait.  This morning I discovered a loose nut behind the wheel and a spark-plug that didn't fire.  I started looking at the converted .odt document that looked so pristine and discovered that a lot of formatting had not converted.  Most noticeable was that the .odt document had preserved the formatting but set into what looks like a standard letter sized page rather than the Word and Scribus documents, which are set for a standard sized 5.25"x8.0" book.

The up-shot of this is that if I go back into the LibreOffice document and edit that to conform to the original Word and Scribus page size a lot of my formatting problems may very well correct themselves.  Also from your hint, it sounds like I had better go back and study-up on paragraph styles.  I thought that would be picked up by the styles that were imported.  Indeed the font style itself and most point sizes did translate.

I'm still left with the mashed up imported text sitting in my Scribus document and found no way of deleting the text for a do over.  Also I noted that once the imported text was inside the text frames, the frame itself would not activate (highlight red) and the text itself seemed uneditable--frozen.  What path can I take to solve these two issues?

In the meantime I'll send you the .sla file and a couple of screen shots of each title page.

Thanks,


JohnJR

Sorry Folks; it seems that the previous post seized up and I suspect it has to do with the attachments.  Either they are too big or that there are too many of them (3?).  All three of the attachments are in the 33 KB range each--tops.  Or what?

I hate to be a repeat whiner, however being in the dark about why posts don't go through should really bear with some attention, guidance, and clarification.

Thanks,

[attachment deleted by admin]

JohnJR

Here (hopefully) are the screen shots.

Thanks again,

[attachment deleted by admin]

utnik

hi john

i opened your file, double clicked at random into text frames and found all of them editable – what exactly is your problem?
(i tested with scribus 1.4.6 on macos 10.11.6...)

utnik

GarryP

Thanks for the extra info' JohnJR, that makes things clearer.

First, I can confirm that I get the same reaction as utnik when trying to edit your document with Scribus 1.4.6 on Windows 10 which is that I can double-click into various random text frames and edit the text as I would expect. As with utnik, I'm not having the problem you are getting. I have no idea why we can do what you cannot do with the same file. (One thought is that because you have a very long text frame chain it could be causing problems if your machine is slow or doesn't have much spare memory. It's probably not that, it's just off the top of my head.)

I also have no idea why you are having problems with attachments on the forum. All I can say is that the forum software is old and clunky (in my opinion) and should be replaced with something better. a.l.e has already been asking what people think about a change here: http://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,2328.0.html

I don't have many .DOCX files, and certainly none that would be good to test conversion to .ODT, but if there's a problem with the conversion in LibreOffice then that's really an issue for the LO team rather than it being a Scribus issue. From personal experience I know that comments give problems and images sometimes do but I've not had much problem with normal text, not that I use LO very much on a day-to-day basis.

I've just done a quick test with some sample text in an .ODT file, formatting with in-built and user-created paragraph styles. Importing the text into a Scribus text frame with "Automatic" as the importer brought most of the paragraph formatting with it just fine except for a font substitution. (An import with the importer as "OpenOffice Writer" seemed to ignore the formatting completely.)

Character formatting will not be imported, so if your text was formatted with character styles in LO - instead of paragraph styles - then you will lose that formatting. Also, any bold and italic formatting will be lost as Scribus uses the proper font variants where word processors generally don't (they manipulate the glyphs on-the-fly to create bold-ish and italic-ish versions).

So, I think the upshot is:
* Make sure the correct paragraph styles have been applied to the text in LO;
* Make sure that the conversion to .ODT was successful;
* Import the text using the "Automatic" importer.

One other tip: Split your text into chapters and import each chapter into a new text frame chain. You will find it much quicker and easier to make changes that way.

JohnJR

Hi Folks,

Some of my editing within text frames does appear to be the slower response, things do move and justify and the characters are individually editable if I wait a moment.  I had read about the response delay and should have taken that into account by suspending my impatience a little to realize it.  My iMac is late 2009 and I'm told not overly endowed with memory (4Gb) and that lè El Capitan taxes the poor devil quite a bit

I haven't been able yet to highlight text to, say, change the point size for instance and still do need to delete all the current text within the document in order to re-import  the now corrected .ODT page size.  I'll see if I can figure this for myself first, given the fact that I made so many amateur errors above.

One thing that I'm a little curious about and might be of interest to you: I have both a page-number text frame and a chapter text frame both in the header.  They show as gray (un-selected) boxes in the document.  And they seem to stay that way; every time I click on either one of these boxes they do not activate (outline in red)  I haven't gotten that far yet as to placing text/numbering in those boxes, but am concerned about when I do that they will remain mute.

Thanks folks,

utnik

hi john

Quote from: JohnJR on March 10, 2017, 10:33:31 PM...need to delete all the current text within the document in order to re-import  the now corrected .ODT page size.

i can't see why the .odt page size matters...

QuoteI have both a page-number text frame and a chapter text frame both in the header.  They show as gray (un-selected) boxes in the document.  And they seem to stay that way...

you can't edit master page objects on the document pages.
you should insert the page number on the master page ('insert' → 'character → 'page number') – and for the chapter text you have to chose between a solution with different master pages and the scrapbook to copy the text to multiple pages.

utnik

JohnJR

Hi Folks,

You were right, the different page-size issue in the LibreOffice formatting made no difference to Scribus document, it flowed the text nicely into all the correctly defined document pages just fine.

I'm going to leave your suggestions about my header issues aside for the moment while I address the font, point size, and indention changes that occurred in translation from .odt to .sla.

For the font and point size (title and chapter pages) I found no way to edit those directly with the text itself albeit in Scribus the recognition of a different font size registered.  My solution was to highlight the text, delete it, and construct two new text frames inside the document (margin) text frames and just retype the text back in (fortunately in a title page there's not much to retype).  From there I could highlight words and use the property palette to apply the various fonts and point sizes.  This technique worked down to letters, LaCunnas for example.  It was tedious but it worked.

The problems I'm facing now involve the body text itself (56 Pages).  In the import all the text came through left-justified instead of the original fully-justified.  And the original five-space indent tabs came through as 17-spaces, a third of a line.

If I highlighted the text in a single page manually (click and drag), using the properties palette I was able to fully-justify that one page only.  I tried using Edit > Select All, hoping to see it highlight all the flowing text--nothing happened.  Story Editor or Edit > Styles offered no choices I could see.  Neither did Document Setup, Sections.  As to the paragraph indention issue: I could delete the tab and set the text back to left-justified, but hitting the tab the indention jumped right back to 17 spaces.  I deleted the tab again and manually entered five spaces and everything went normally, for that paragraph only.

Both those reformatting issues are probably related.  Can you give me a path to universally (whole document) correct these two body text issues?

There might be something about Master Pages I don't understand.  When I set up this document I created a set (double) of mirrored pages and constructed three text frames (two in the header and one filling the margins, applied that to 56 pages (blank or not) and imported the .odt document.  In essence the Master Pages are the document.  I might have missed something.

Thanks,



utnik

 hi john

you should define your fonts, point sizes, justification and indention in paragraph styles (and the appearance of highlighted words in character styles).
Quote from: JohnJR on March 13, 2017, 05:33:26 AMThere might be something about Master Pages I don't understand. When I set up this document I created a set (double) of mirrored pages and constructed three text frames...

as i said before, you can't edit master page objects in the individual document pages!

utnik

CGood

Might templates or scrapbook items be more useful and intuitive here?