Picking the ideal text importer

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Lynn

My current process in Scribus is this:
  • I download the base text of the book as a html file
  • I use a script to apply html header styles to components of the text (chapter titles, chapter numbers, first paragraph of chapter, first paragraph of scene, scene break ornaments)
  • I set the substitution fonts for bold, italic and bold italic to my body text style
  • I import using the html importer & reassign all those header styles to the component styles for the book

There are downsides of working directly from html are as follows:
  • I have to keep a cheatsheet reminding me which header style maps to which document style
  • Headers are all set to the bold substitution font. The only way to avoid this is to lie to Scribus and tell it to substitute bold fonts with the regular body text font. If course, then you have to manually add any bold text back in. I swear when I started this workflow in 1.4.8 it didn't bold the headers, but now it does.
  • There are a maximum of 6 html header types. This is plenty for an html document but I've started to run out - work title, author name, chapter title, chapter number, chapter title decoration, paragraph start, scene start and scene break gets me to eight. In a work with epistolary sections like letters or text messages I might have even more sections I need to flag. I've had to drop off the work and author names.

I've considered the libreoffice importer, but that would bring in far more information than I want. I don't want to retain any formatting from the original except bold, italics and the marking where the paragraph styles are.

Markdown automatically imports the bold and italic text as character styles, but retains all my other issues with HTML and adds a pandoc conversion step.

Theoretically, the text filter importer would work perfectly to map my "header" styles to paragraph styles without adding excess bolds. But unfortunately there's no way to set character styles in the text filter importer. I suppose I could regex the XML after importing with another script.

Any suggestions on whether I'm missing the perfect importer for my purposes, or should I keep on with html for now?