Importing LO Writer text without over-writing existing styles

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henrylaw

I am managing production of a newsletter which has contributions from various sources. All the contributions come in as Microsoft Word documents, and use a standard template with named styles, which allow the writers to see what their text will look like before they send it.

My job is to assemble all the copy into a Scribus document for publication.  I have a set of agreed paragraph styles which currently have the same name as those in the Word template.

I can import the copy by saving it as LibreOffice writer and then importing the resulting file.  That works well, but is a maintenance nightmare.  If I change the definition of a style within Scribus, which I occasionally do, then when the contributors' text is imported Scribus promptly replaces any changes I've made with the original formatting from the Word styles.  Sending out a new template to the Word users is difficult: they don't necessarily have the skill to install it properly; and I don't have MS Word anyway so I'd be trusting that a converted LO template would work correctly.

My current plan is to change the names of my Scribus styles, and then when each contribution is imported, using the existing style names, I can do a bulk change from a Word style names to my new Scribus style names. 

Yes, I know I can import just as plain text and then apply my own styles; that's laborious.  And I know I can import so as to give the imported styles a prefix relating to the name of the text box: I'd need to change each text box separately, and in a 24-page document that's tedious and error-prone.

Is there any better way?

a.l.e

I think that, for now, the only good way to do that is by using a Python script inside of Scribus.

If you provide me with a bit more details, I think I should be able to create something that can generally be used for similar cases.

I think that -- as an example -- you might want to provide:

  • three .odt files the three styles as you are getting them, and just a bit of text (one paragraph for each style, ...)
  • a .sla file with the three style already defined, and three text frames where the three .odt files are already loaded and manually formatted the way the should be; please remove any style that should not be in the final .sla
  • if any local formatting (italic, ...) should be imported, please make sure that they appear in the .odt
  • try to keep all the document as short as possible, but with enough content to allow to understand your task