Tables

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Mike1970

Hello

I really like Scribus, but the table function ruins it for me. Tables need to be a bit more clever than just a grouped pack of text boxes. Or maybe I am doing it wrong?

I would need to be able to insert OLE tables from OpenOffice (preferably), like OpenOffice Draw and Impress can do. Or even better: offer that kind of formatting capabilities natively. If I could cut/paste a matrix of values from a spreadsheet - with fonts and sizes and column widths and joined cells and whatnot, and micromanage such properties within Scribus, I would use it exclusively.

Is the developers working on this in some way? Collaborating with OpenOffice or some such?

I am sorry that I have little to offer than this petulant complain.

Friendly,
/M

GarryP

Welcome to the forum Mike1970.

You're right in saying that the table function is little more than a group of text boxes. There's a bit more to it than that because there's extra outline functionality - which is sort of "hidden" - but it doesn't come close to what you can do in other software at the moment.

I believe that 1.5.0 will have better table handling but I'm not sure how far it will go, if it happens.

My general recommendation is to create tables in Open/LibreOffice and export to one of the formats Scribus can handle (SVG/EPS/PNG/whatever) and import it. It's not a brilliant solution but it's really all we've got at the moment for anything complicated.

(There's always the option of using LaTeX in a render frame but that means learning another thing altogether, and it's not what you want anyway.)

P.S. I imagine that the code to handle copy/paste from O/LO into Scribus would be horrendous given all the formatting options and differences between the two applications, but I agree that it would be nice to have.

utnik

Quote from: GarryP on May 24, 2015, 03:18:43 PMI believe that 1.5.0 will have better table handling but I'm not sure how far it will go, if it happens.

scribus 1.5 is out and can be downloaded here. i didn't find the time to play with the new features, so i don't know how powerful the new tables are...
always keep in mind that scribus 1.5 is a developer version on the way to the new stable 1.6!
files created or edited with scribus 1.5 can't be opened with earlier versions, but hopefully (and most probably) with 1.6...

utnik

Mike1970

Crikey - version 1.5 is actually vastly improved in the table department! Tables are now actually tables, borders and widths can be easily manipulated and cells merged.

Can't just cut/paste matrixes from OO Calc, unfortunately. Can't make text property changes on more than one cell at a time. Various other minor things - when I drag the borders it rescales, but when I enter a width dimension it crops.

I shall definitely make an attempt using the stable version when it comes out. It will take some extra work compared to my current OpenOffice Calc+Draw strategy, but probably give more consistent results.

I might mention that I passed on FrameMaker for being too primitive in the tables department as well, so Scribus is now at least quite on par with that.

Thank you!

dagoss

I use Scribus for rudimentary tables regularly--but using tabs.

When copying/pasting from most spreadsheet programs into a text editor, you usually get tab separated data (if not, it's easily enough to save it that way). I use paragraph styles for different table/column sizes via tab spacing. There are some obvious downsides to this (the main one being that paragraph styles don't support horizontal rules above/below).

For the kinds of tables I do, this actually works very well. In fact, I'm often able to work out entire reports in a plain old text editor, then using Scribus's text import and everything just kind of looks right.

fox72

And I need the import and layout of large and long tables. An example can be seen in the attached file

[attachment deleted by admin]

Malsasa

Quote from: Mike1970 on May 25, 2015, 05:15:57 PM
Crikey - version 1.5 is actually vastly improved in the table department! Tables are now actually tables, borders and widths can be easily manipulated and cells merged.
Hello, Mike. Thank you for this. I will try 1.5 because of this.

Ged

Hi,

Ive just created a table in Scribus 5.2.  It worked well but I would just like to mention a potential problem.  When I saw the padding lines inside of each cell, they appeared to be a double-line pattern of the actual border.  It was not till I looked at print preview that I realised what was happening.

May I suggest that padding lines be indicated in color or dotted?
My first 'puter was a 286,
My first dtp was Aldus Pagemaker,
My first printer was a Little Squirt,
My first car was a motorbike.

Wusel1811

#8
Hi everyone,

I've inserted a table into Scribus 1.5.2

I can write text into some of the cells just fine, but with others, when I double click the cell and start entering text, it doesn't appear. Instead, I get this little small x in the bottom right corner as soon as I've entered a single letter on my keyboard.

One of the cells lets me enter two letters before the x appears, but they are at the right end of the cell instead of the upper left.

Edit: I found out that the problem cells are second row, column 4 and 5. When I click in them, the cursor is as high as the cell. How can I change the text size of a cell? I don't find it anywhere...
Does anyone have an idea what is going on?

I tried deleting the table and starting it over, but it happened again and to the same cells...


GarryP

Welcome to the forum Wusel1811.

My recommendation, as stated above, would be to create tables in something like LibreOffice Calc and export them - as PNG/SVG/etc. - for import into Scribus. There are way more formatting options.

The little "boxed-X" in the cell - which is just a text frame - means that there is more text in the frame than it can display (or it is taller than the frame).

Row 4, Column 4 looks oddly formatted. If you have to use Scribus tables then I would suggest creating styles for the table text. That way you can assign formatting quickly and change it quickly if things look wrong.

You can use the Properties Palette Text tab to format the text but you need to be able to select the text to be able to format it without using styles. You might try and use the story editor in this case instead.

As you're using a developmental version of Scribus - 1.5.x - I can't be of much more help; it's still a work in progress and, as such, your problem could be a bug or it could be just how Scribus works depending on exactly what you're doing. With developmental versions of software it's very much more difficult to tell. If in doubt, use the stable version instead.

Wusel1811

Thank you very much, I'll try Libre Office for the table. I use Scribus 1.5.2 because I have to open Publisher files, the older versions can't do that, as far as I know.