Suggestion : save to an older version of scribus

[Nairo]

Hello,

I installed version 1.6 of scribus, but I had a problem. I would have liked to be able to save my document so that I could reopen it in an older version. I'm thinking that in case of bugs, or in case of "file sharing", it might be a good idea to choose the version in which you save the file.

Well, I imagine it won't be easy, especially depending on the version, with the new features.

However, it could be an idea worth exploring. Here, I've switched to version 1.6 because the 1.5 I have is very slow. I'm trying to convert my daughter's school (they edit a newspaper) to Scribus rather than Canva. I'm thinking they might not bother with regular updates, especially as they're not pro.

So I'm putting the idea forward, in case it's not too complicated or time-consuming.

Thanks in advance 

[AdmFubar]

Being professional has nothing to do with with updating. Scribus is free and low cost, as updating will only take some time to do.

If you really want to go that route, you need to edit the sla file and replace the version number with the lower version number of scribus that you are using. You will need to use a text editor to do this.

[BN_Dev]

In fairness it's not a terrible idea/request, but implementing it would require someone with some time and a (lot of) attention to detail to track any changes to the file format.  You would have to work out backwards compatible changes, how to "safely" lose properties and attributes when downgrading, and much more.

QuarkXPress has a separate version update tool.  Perhaps Nairo you could consider making something similar if this is an issue for you?

I know in QXP there's a trick if you hold down certain keyboard keys when opening an older file it triggers some different actions and reflows; perhaps we could have something similar with Scribus to side-step the file version check and hope for the best, but that could cause crashes and YMMV.

[a.l.e]

Paul's suggestion is a good one: it should probably be a separate tool.

Doing it that way, would be "not that hard"...

I guess that the most tedious part is to create a DTD of the .sla file format (and keep it up to date).
This is a work (almost) anybody with basic computer skills can do.
Once this is done, it should not be hard to create a tool that handles the differences (https://manpages.org/dtddiff is a Linux tool that can be used for that...)

In most cases, the .sla format only changes by additions. Sometimes behavior can change without the file format being changed (and such a tool could warn about it).

And, having a DTD of the .sla could really help for creating other tools that work "correctly" on Scribus files...