Import Page(s). Add to Scribus' isuee tracker? [Solved question]

[joesber]

Good morning everyone,

while layouting a book the best option to avoid big mistakes is to layout every chapter in a different document, and afterwards importing everything into an unified document just to add pagination, TOC, and the little details before exporting the project.

The problem with the tool "import page(s)", is that it does not import ALL the information, just the pages itself and the text boxes. Only the first text box is filled with text, and the user must manually link the text again. But once all the text is linked in the boxes, it has lost much of the changes to avoid widows and orphans (as the manually hiphenation changes)
The imported pages come also without their master pages, so the user must import them also manually and apply them one by one. If the master pages are different in every chapter/document, then it means a lot of manually working time.

Does someone have find a way of working to avoid the mentioned problems? If not i will consider to add it to the Issues Tracker of Scribus

Thanks

[GarryP]

When you say "the best option to avoid big mistakes is to layout every chapter in a different document", what problems are you trying to avoid?

Are these problems that you have encountered for yourself or perceived problems that you might have heard about? There are plenty of articles all over the web that say Scribus can't do something when it actually can. Lots of people have successfully made large publications with Scribus, see https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Success_stories_2017 for some examples.

Master pages, as you say, are not automatically imported and you have to manually import them after importing the pages and re-apply them. This is not an ideal situation but not necessarily a bug; probably more of an omission. There are already plenty of Mantis tickets about this, E.g. https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=12588

The links between text frames on the same page are kept - as you would expect - but links between pages are not. This is a bug. See https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=8056

If you really have to split your document up, for pagination you can set each document to have its own starting page number in "Document Setup / Sections". It means a bit of manual calculation but it's not a huge task.

As for the TOC, if you want something good then I would recommend doing it manually. The TOC features of Scribus aren't very sophisticated and it will probably take you less time to do it manually than to try and get exactly what you want automatically (if it's at all possible).

If you have your pagination right and you do the TOC manually then you could look into stitching the exported PDFs together - plenty of utilities are available - but that's not something I've tried on anything non-trivial so I can't personally recommend anything.

[joesber]

Hi Garry!

Thanks for yours fast and detailed answer.

It seems that my research ability needs to improve, since I couldn't find the existing issues about the importing pages in mantis. In your link is allready the bug described. If i find something else during the importing, I will try to reproduce it and add it in the comments of the existing bug issue in Mantis

When you say "the best option to avoid big mistakes is to layout every chapter in a different document", what problems are you trying to avoid?

The normal stuff: if you have a large document  it could happen that the program crashes (though it happens rarely) and it wasn't yet saved. Also if you press some keys without willing it or knowing it, you may change the whole document, not finding what happened till it is too late. Those are only some examples. Also Scribus works (of course) much faster using smaller documents.

For the moment I think the best solution for large projects is yours: spliting in documents the project, semi-manual numbering, manual TOC, and merging the pdfs with an external tool. I have not tried it yet, and I only wonder how good are those tools in creating pdf documents for professional printing. Personally I really like Scribus precisely for its power when exporting and its color management. For instance it is the only libre software I know which can export in CMYK and RGB, and even select the desired ICC color profile.

In the future would be nice to have a kind of Master Document, to have all the documents within it, refresh all the data within a button, synchronize master pages and styles, and finally exporting the whole project (http://forums.scribus.net/index.php/topic,2620.msg12132.html#msg12132)

The project I'm working right now is about 210 pages, and I'm allready merging all the documents in a final document, to export it and send it to the printing house. Scribus works a bit slowlier, but still good enough. If everything goes smoothly, I may add two books really soon to the succes stories! By the way, there are wonderful works done over there with Scribus!

[GarryP]

You're welcome.

Scribus - as with any other application - could crash whether the document is large or small so splitting a document up doesn't really make much of a difference. I understand where you're coming from but getting into the habit of saving often and using Save As to create a history generally does the job for me. There's always the Autosave feature too.

If you want to try and avoid inadvertent changes then you could think about splitting the document into different layers. For example, you could put Chapter 1 on its own layer, then Chapter 2 on another, and so forth. You could then lock each layer when you want to avoid changes to the related chapter. It won't stop changes to things like styles from being made but it's better than nothing. All said, unless Scribus asked "Are you sure?" every time we did anything, we've just got to careful.

I've never used PDF merging software/services myself for anything other than trivial stuff where the quality wasn't important and I've never used them for printed material so I can't say how well they work. I would imagine that the cheap/simple software/services wouldn't take much notice of things like colour profiles and probably wouldn't produce something that was best quality. I could be wrong about that though.

My guess is that if the import function worked better then some kind of "master document" concept might not be needed. If you could just select a group of documents and import them all at the same time merging styles and master pages etc. then that would probably do for most people. Having said that, everyone has their own preferred way of working and what's good for one may not be good for another.

Anyway, good luck and I look forward to seeing your publication(s) on the Success Stories pages.