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Michael Mueller

Hello,
Allow me to briefly introduce myself – I am Michael Müller, a German travel book publisher and author. My titles, published by my eponymous publishing house, enjoy a high reputation in German-speaking countries. For several years now, we have also been developing the travel guide app mmtravel (iOS/Android).
In order to build such an app with e-books, it is necessary to store the texts with semantic information.
To do this, we worked with LibreOffice developer Lásló Németh to make the Resource Description Framework usable in LibreOffice.
For a systematic workflow for print and app production, I am looking for a way to use these RDF-enriched LO files in InDesign for print output, with an equally powerful export function so that authors can use the latest production status for a new edition.
For Scribus, there is a LibreOffice import filter developed by Petr Vaněk. Perhaps there is a former developer who can help us estimate the development effort required?
In the case of InDesign and LibreOffice, the format to be supported would be IDML.

Michael Müller

a.l.e

Hi Michael,

Thank you for considering Scribus!

Currently, Scribus can import both ODT and IDML files.

Export is currently only to PDF, an initial support for EPUB is in the working and should be making some bigger progress before the end of the year.

Now, what is the work that should be done in Scribus for supporting Resource Description Framework?
On what kind of import or export would you want to see improvements?
Do you have any specifications that Lásló Németh wrote for his project in Libre Office?

Have a wonderful evening
a.l.e

Michael Mueller

Hi A.L.e,
sorry for my late answer, first I needed clarefication from other side.

This is the very earla Issue for RDF -
https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/OfficeDev/RDF_metadata

These are the more recent ones to start working with the feature -

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.2#Custom_color_metadata_field_shadings

Colored bookmarks for metadata visualization

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.5#Colored_bookmarks_for_metadata_visualization

Bookmark visualization
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.5#Bookmark_visualization

Conference presentation

It was not possible to share my LiboCon 2025 slides about our developments, because it was a lightning talk without a dedicated web page,  so now  I've added the slides to my other presentation. Slide 12 contains a visual introduction:

https://events.documentfoundation.org/media/libreoffice-conference-2024/submissions/QEDSF7/resources/ForgottenWord_wk8UsXW.pdf

(see on https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference-2024/talk/QEDSF7/)

Michael Müller



a.l.e

Hi Michael,

I still don't really get which features related to RDF, you would like to see in Scribus.
But I have to admit that I don't really get yet, what exactly is the Resource Description Framework in our context and how it can be used in text documents.
You might want to provide example of what you plan to do with it.
(Of course, I get why having a standard for defining a tree of properties and values is very useful.)

From the screenshots and slides you linked to, I guess that Scribus needs a good way (ok, theoretically, a better way...) to show properties attached to text.
We have limited support for bookmarks and references, but they are not implemented in a good way and the user interface is not comfortable.

From my point of view, if I somehow understood correctly your goal, I would approach the issue by first implementing from scratch HTTP links.
I think that this is the simplest thing that looks like an RDF resource (but has a much smaller scope).
The issues to be solved are:
  • How to display the URLs in the document
  • How to let the Scribus user edit the values attached to each URL
  • How to add the URLs in document intended for print and how to do it in the case of Web distribution.

I think that we would need to already know what the exact scope of the RDF support in Scribus needs to be, to make sure that the implementation can scale to support your RDF requirements.
Another requirement that should be taken into consideration: in the future, the link should also work inside of the PDF document (as an example for the TOC). But this part does not need to be implemented yet (if it's not useful for RDF).

Without doing this preparation work, and without exact requirements on what needs to be supported, it's very hard to say how much effort is needed.

So, instead of thinking about how much time it will be to implement the feature, I think that it would be more suitable to define a maximal effort to do an explorative work.

On the other side, I've not yet had the chance to work on the ODT import code, but from what I've seen, it's one of the nicest part of the Scribus code base.
And the ODT format also looks very clean.
And if the PDF has a way to store those value, that part should not be hard, either.

Sorry, that I can't give you more precise information.