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Scribus => Text and Typography => Topic started by: Lynn on February 24, 2026, 07:02:47 PM

Title: Picking the ideal text importer
Post by: Lynn on February 24, 2026, 07:02:47 PM
My current process in Scribus is this:

There are downsides of working directly from html are as follows:

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?
Title: Re: Picking the ideal text importer
Post by: a.l.e on February 26, 2026, 03:29:45 PM
Personally, the HTML workflow looks very sensible to me.

Sadly, it probably does not work as well as it should.

Would you mind creating a few sample HTML that are ready to be imported into Scribus and a .sla document with the state before starting importing them and one .sla showing how they should ideally be once the HTML files have been imported?
Title: Re: Picking the ideal text importer
Post by: Lynn on February 27, 2026, 12:31:19 AM
I did a little test on my lunch break and made you some sample documents using the book templates I have shared on github & the first four chapters of The Great Gatsby. I tested importing both the html and a markdown version run through https://pandoc.org/app/. I didn't customize the samples much, since this is just a demo.

HTML Notes:

Markdown Notes:

GreatGatsbyTemplate is the file with no text imported; GreatGatsbyFinal is a cleaned up version with styles applied. Markdown shows the way the default paragraph style wasn't applied to the body text using the markdown importer. I couldn't upload the HTML file as .html, so I renamed it into a .txt file.

(oh, almost forgot - the list of substitutions I use is on page 21 of this PDF: https://github.com/notwhelmedyet/ScribusTypesetting/blob/main/ReferenceDocs/AbridgedTutorial.pdf (https://github.com/notwhelmedyet/ScribusTypesetting/blob/main/ReferenceDocs/AbridgedTutorial.pdf))
Title: Re: Picking the ideal text importer
Post by: Lynn on March 03, 2026, 01:58:40 AM
Did some more testing today after a friend was unable to replicate the locally-assigned-bold issue I was having on html import. I loaded the same 3 html files about 5 times each in Scribus 1.6.1, 1.6.4 and 1.7.2 in new files, cleared files and my template.

I think, and I'm still not sure if there's other circumstances where this happens, that the problem arises specifically if you import the text twice because you messed up your substitution font. The sequence of events:

I don't remember making that mistake last week when I was testing, but I am pretty forgetful so it's not unlikely. It looks like the lesson is to always close the file without saving if you mess up the import and load it into a fresh file.