Creating running headers/footers based on a text box value on front page

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PJ_Robinson

Hi all,
This is my first posting in the forum (so I guess I now won't get deleted).
I've come to Scribus from InDesign / QuarkXpress environments so am familiar with many of the basics of DTP and layout, as well as having experience of Visual Basic programming and some html experience.
I'm using Scribus 1.4.8, on a Windows 10 64-bit OS.
I'm trying to convert a newsletter template which I'd previously used in InDesign and Quark which consists of 8 pages, of which the first page is a '1st page master' and the 2nd to 8th pages are laid out and based upon 'Normal left' and 'Normal right' master pages. I have therefore added the regular elements to the page masters (page number, page framing, etc.). What I have been able to do in Quark and InDesign, however, is add an issue number for my newsletter to a field on the front page as a visible element and then that gets carried through to a running footer on each page (eg 'Winter 2019' on the title area of the front - appearing as
     'Page 2 - Winter 2019'         |   |         'Winter 2019 - Page 3'
etc. I hope that's clear.

I understand from reading a few other submissions and help pages that there may be possible ways to create references and footnotes in version 1.5, but is there any way I can create a text box that can be filled in at publication time and which then automatically updates the footers (or headers) with the value I've put in the text box? Or do I have to bite the bullet and simply manually update the running footers myself?

Thanks for any thoughts, comments or suggestions.

Peter R.
Portugal   

dragonfly

Hello. I am just another interested user and not part of the Scribus development team. However I follow this forum because I have some ideas for integrating Scribus into workflows. Nor do I have any experience with Indesign or Quark.
Intuitively, I feel that your problem might be served by using Python scripting such as ScribusGenerator.

https://github.com/berteh/ScribusGenerator

You would create in an external spreadsheet your variables such as %VAR_Issue% = "Winter 2019"
and include/embed  %VAR_Issue% in your headers/footers. Then apply the script to modify your document.

As the documentation explains it is rather like mailmerge (except you are merging data or titles or other objects into the Scribus document in a final stage). There are many uses for this script.

a.l.e

in scribus 1.5 you can create variable texts. (insert > marks > variable text).

it's not a stable feature yet, but in your case it should work good enough.


otherwise, with three master pages it's not such big deal to edit three times the header...

i would not use the generator for that...

rocking

Thanks for this tip.  I work on a monthly newsletter for a club and despite it being "not a big deal" to edit three master pages, it has been forgotten surprisingly often.

I am running 1.5.7 and it is still at Insert > Marks > Variable text.  (things do move around sometimes from one release to another and wanted to confirm this menu path)