Feature discussion: job jacket rules

[BN_Dev]

Hi all,

^^ With regards to this post ^^

An essential feature we need is something analogous to Job Jacket Rules in QuarkXPress.  See QuarkXPress 2023 User Guide: Working with Rules and Rule Sets.

Job Jackets are a terrible stupid name, but essentially they're a way of sharing common resources between multiple files related to the same project (resources can be your corporate color scheme/paragraph styles/etc.)  But one of the resource types that allow you to share are preflight rules that are run on certain hooks (usually before exporting a PDF but can be set to run on open/save/demand etc).

Although Scribus has PDF verification for various standards, the job jacket rules allow you to specify various user tests that are applied to the document to enforce not just technical PDF compliance but layout policy compliance.  If the tests fail you can mark them as warnings that tell the user, or errors that abort the export.

Rules can be specified to match against anything; or just certain types of boxes (frames); or just text content; etc.

Here are some of the real-world use case rules we have setup that are run before exports:

• STOP: Image color space is RGB (should be converted to CMYK and our print profile)
• STOP: Colors are specified as RGB (they are out of gamut)
• STOP: Fonts have been substituted (will cause broken ugly output)
• STOP: Text box has overflown (story is cut off)
• WARN: Something is left on the pasteboard (might have forgotten to put it in the layout)
• WARN: Something is rotated between 0°-15° CW/CCW (usually an accident rather than a deliberate rotation over 15°)
• WARN: Dark text on a dark background/light text on a light background (hard to read)

We are aware there are some built-in checks for things like overflow etc., but the feature request was for the checks to be user editable and a wider range of them so they better allow us to reach the same level of policy compliance that we can with QuarkXPress.

As you can probably guess, with a newsprint publication put together at speed by a team of people this can be invaluable to making sure nothing silly happens.  Job jacket rules have been a life-vest multiple times and would mean it becomes somewhat dangerous to move a production workflow away from a program that was trying to help you not make mistakes.

However it does seem that implementing this sort of functionality should be quite easy by traversing the outline tree and seeing if any relevant tests match the properties of each item.

Many thanks,
Paul

[a.l.e]

isn't this something that should be done through scripting?

personally, i would prefer if scribus would not have this type of features.

looks like a monster that is very hard to be done in the right way: both from the UI and the code side (lot of flexibility, all features must be possible).

what i would like is:

a python script that can do this.

i would say that at first there should be a python script with little to no UI, that make sure that the rules can be done with the scripter API.
at first the rules would be hard coded in the script.
in a second step, they might be moved in external text files that are read by the script.

then, if there is a need for it, we could have a separated script (or a script using the former one) that has an UI and can be used by people who don't know python.

what do you think about this?

[utnik]

a text file with the settings for different jobs and a script would be great. (maybe with a ui to write the settings to the text file and to grab the right set for the actual job – and without tkinter, as this would ban it from mac os...)

utnik

[a.l.e]

i think that the tool for creating the config file can also run from outside of scribus...

then it can easily be done with qt and python...