Place-holder for section name in Masterpage

[Marian]

Hello,

I am quite new to scribus. I am trying to find some basic functions and it seems, that Masterpage can not generate automatically any other labels, except pagination. Am I right or may I be missing something? Is there a way to put other automatical labels/place-holders to the masterpage, such as section names, chapters, etc.?

I do not really have experience with layouting complex documents, such as books and brochures, except in lyx/latex. There, tools for such layouts are pretty robust (for instance, put a chapter name in the header of every even page and section name on every odd and pagination in the footer...).
Scribus is of course a very different programm. What would be the best workflow to cop with similar tasks in scribus? Putting section/chapter names on each page manually can't really be considered a serious solution for any larger project (book, brochure, presentations, etc.), I suppose...
Or are there some plans to include similar functionalities in the future?

Thank you any advice.

[a.l.e]

something like this will come into scribus.

the development version of scribus now has variable texts and marks.
but it's not stable yet.

first we need that somebody checks that everything is fine in there and then we have to find a solution for context aware variable texts...
if a new developer wants to jump in, it will happen earlier : - )
(basically, we need somebody who needs this feature, has free time (or the feature is worth enough money that she can do it as a paid job) and has the skills to fix and program the feature).

[Marian]

Thank you for your answer.

Good to hear these functions will come eventually. Unfortunately, I do not have the features, to help develop it. But I might have a look at the development version of scribus and give it a try. I am about to produce a small brochure presentation (small job, but lots of graphics and for print -- so neither libreoffice, nor lyx fits very well), could be a good testing material for dev version of software.

[JohnJR]

Hi,

I think I have successfully done this for a novella using Scribus 1.5.2 on Mac OS X 10.11.6 as early as 2017.  On the even pages I had a header box for my name (plus a pagination box), and on odd pages a header box for the novella's title (plus a pagination box).  The two header boxes were integral to the body of the manuscript pages that applied and were set up as "master pages", only for us neophytes how things get done, God only knows.  The pagination boxes flowed fine.  Perhaps I'm missing something in this discussion.

[jack_cat]

I think that the ONLY practical solution here, at the current stage of Scribus development,
where a piece of text in the header has to be dynamic in some way,
is to create multiple master pages. Then you apply these master pages as you see fit.

Here again I will mention that in my use of Scribus I don't keep all of the chapters of a
book in one file, but keep them in separate files which are manageable within my memory
limitations, so that Scribus does not run slowly. So, there are only a handful of master pages
for each file the way I work, and often just three, a right, a left, and a first-chapter-page.
But it would not be difficult to set up a number of master pages with more information included,
so that each section within a chapter has its own master page with its own header with the
section number. 

So, for instance, if I have a chapter which, for clarity, ought to have running headers which reflect
the content of a particular section, or if I wish to put running section numbers at the tops of
pages, then the easy way is to make a lot of separate master pages with the running headers
hard coded, and apply them as desired.

However, there is a function in the Doc Setup where sections of the file may be defined. I have
used this area of the Setup only for setting the initial page number for the beginning of each
chapter. I have not experimented with the following possibility which appears to be implied as
an eventual fully developed capacity: define sections which could be tied to specific master pages
or possibly even to specific dynamic fields within one master page.

As I say, I don't think this is possible yet but it appears to be coming. If somebody has
experimented with this or if one of the development team knows that this is so, please comment.