Collaborative work in Teams/Sharepoint environment?

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StephanP

We moved from MS Publisher to Scribus for the creation of this year's Graduation Yearbook.

  • We are a small team of students plus one teacher
  • All the files (SLA + images) are in a Teams folder structure, which basically is SharePoint
  • In order to reduce the risk of a total loss if something goes awry, as well as to minimize file sizes, the 80 page yearbook has already been split into 40 two-page SLA documents
  • When all facing page documents are finalized, I will combine them into one document and produce the PDF for the printer
Questions:

  • Can anyone confirm this to be a good working method for collaborative work with Scribus?
  • I noticed that images (photos) are typically NOT integrated into the SLA files, but referenced by their location. This appears to work from my perspective, but will it hold for the other co-workers as well? IOW, are relative paths used for references to the images?
  • How can I instruct Scribus to actually import the images into the SLA files and can this be made a permanent setting?
  • Should we be aware of other issues in our Teams/SharePoint file system working environment?

StephanP

(I'd like to answer my own questions)

Within the small team we just confirmed that Scribus works fine within MS SharePoint environments.

  • All team members must use OneDrive on their pc. OneDrive must include the same (additional) account as used within Teams/SharePoint.
  • In Teams>Files>SharePoint use the option "create shortcut in OneDrive"
  • From that point each member can access the shared folder structure with all Scribus files. Important! All image files must be placed in that same shared folder structure!
  • Team members can work on these shared files through the shorcut in OneDrive. Just double click a .sla file and it'll be opened by Scribus.
  • Images in Scribus files are referenced by means of relative paths, apparently. They show up perfectly if one or the other has inserted them. IT WORKS
  • So, there's no need to physically import/embed the graphics within your SLA-files.

StephanP

So, for weeks the team has been working on some 40 two-page documents into which the Yearbook to be was seperated.
I had two reasons for seperating the 80 page document:

  • Damage control. If something goes really bad, then it's not with the full document.
  • Performance. I wasn't sure how Scribus would hold on a image heavy 80 page document

Last week I've started merging all facing pages into the one single document.
I must say that this went without a single issue.

  • I created a new folder at the same level as all folders for the seperated facing pages
  • There I created a new all-in-one scribus document
  • Next, I copied all objects from the original documents into the all-in-one
  • Nothing broke, including the many external images (thanks to the relative path references)
  • I adapted the master pages to include a background image
  • And, O wonder! With 80 image heavy pages, Scribus is performing quite smoothly!
  • My decision to switch from the utterly sluggish MS Publisher to Scribus was a good one

AdmFubar

I don't know if you are doing saving the file this way. but you my want to use the "collect for output" for saving the slaw files as it collects all your images and  .sla together in it's own sub folder. You wont have to do it manually then.

I really think this should be the default save action for scribus.
Using Scribus 1.6.1, openSUSE 15.5
Advanced hobbyist

VanessaMc

Hi Stephan, and other contributors, and thanks for all the useful tips and findings you have put here.

We are also considering switching to Scribus for publications for our small team in a charity in UK. We like to work on a publication collaboratively - perhaps one person writing/editing one article while another on another page, etc.  Is this the sort of collaborating you have done, and does it work well on Scribus?

Vanessa