[scribus] Scribus for phone books?

[Matt Hixson]

Hello Scribus users. I'm wondering if there is anyone out there using
Scribus for creating phone books, both white and yellow pages. Is that
the type of task that Scribus excels at or should I continue looking for
something else?
Basically I'm looking for something that can take a directory of
business/people phone numbers and addresses and graphics files for ads
and do pagination of that data into a telephone book format.
Thanks,
-Matt

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[Christoph Schäfer]

Gesendet: Freitag, 20. Juli 2018 um 17:26 Uhr
Betreff: [scribus] Scribus for phone books?
Hello Scribus users. I'm wondering if there is anyone out there using
Scribus for creating phone books, both white and yellow pages. Is that
the type of task that Scribus excels at or should I continue looking for
something else?
Basically I'm looking for something that can take a directory of
business/people phone numbers and addresses and graphics files for ads
and do pagination of that data into a telephone book format.
Thanks,
-Matt

Hi Matt,


Scribus can easily do this for you if you use the scripting engine and write the necessary code (in Python) yourself or pay someone who can do this for you. An entry point might be the colour chart script: http://www.freiefarbe.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/colorchart_generic.zip


HTH,
Christoph

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[Peter Nermander]

Post by Matt Hixson
Is that
the type of task that Scribus excels at or should I continue looking for
something else?

Scribus does not have anything built in for such tasks, you would have to
script it. Thus it is not something Scribus excels at.

/Peter
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[Peter Nermander]

Post by Peter Nermander
Scribus does not have anything built in for such tasks, you would have to
script it. Thus it is not something Scribus excels at.

That’s a weird conclusion.

Why is it weird?

If you have to write a script for the task, it means Scribus does not excel
at it. The result will depend on the script, not on Scribus.

I am not saying it can't be done in Scribus, I am saying it will take a lot
of manual work. If you don't know anything about Python it will likely take
you more time to learn to write the script than doing the phone book in a
program that already has built in support for catalogs.

/Peter
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[Peter Nermander]

I don’t think there are any generic desktop publishing programs that would
have this functionality built in, or for any other very specific need.
Providing the tools (eg scripter) to enable whatever functionality required
is about enabling a tool to extend a feature set.

It's a matter of what you define as "desktop publishing", at least MS Word
has excellent features for doing catalogs (I have been using them for at
least 20-25 years), I assume the same can be done with any program that has
support for printing custom designed address labels.

But a better solution might be to just use the database application and a
suitable "report generator". Then what you need to design is just the
template for the report generator. I have been doing this with MS Access
for 20-25 years too.

(My use of MS Office is at work, where I have no control of what software
is installed, privately I prefer to tro to use FOSS as much as possible.)


/Peter
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[Jurgen Gaeremyn]

Post by Peter Nermander
It's a matter of what you define as "desktop publishing", at least MS Word
has excellent features for doing catalogs (I have been using them for at
least 20-25 years), I assume the same can be done with any program that has
support for printing custom designed address labels.
But a better solution might be to just use the database application and a
suitable "report generator". Then what you need to design is just the
template for the report generator. I have been doing this with MS Access
for 20-25 years too.
(My use of MS Office is at work, where I have no control of what software
is installed, privately I prefer to tro to use FOSS as much as possible.)

I kind of agree with both sides... Scribus is a great tool for
processing the layout of virtually anything. But you need to have the
text prepped for the process. If this is a big and recurring project, it
might be worth the effort to tweak the scripting to have it working. If
it's a smaller project or only a one-off project, you would be better
off with something like LibreOffice (or MS Office if that's your
horsehouse). It will have easier solutions to quickly generate output -
but will miss out on details like professional grade kerning or high
quality PDF documents.

So basically it's up to you... Scribus is a great tool in the Linux
philosophy: do one thing and do it great + work together with other
great tools for added functionality.

All the best,
Jurgen Gaeremyn

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[Matt Hixson]

I'm tentatively looking for a tool that could replace the current
software we use for paginating our phone books. From what I'm told the
hardest problem is just flowing the entries around variable sized ads.
Here's an example of what we produce:

https://www.actionyp.com/prescott,az/a/1/book/

When one of those ads changes or the size of a heading is changed it
affects how the whole book flows. Is pagination something that Scribus
does naturally or does even that require some scripting?
-Matt

Post by Jurgen Gaeremyn

Post by Peter Nermander
It's a matter of what you define as "desktop publishing", at least MS Word
has excellent features for doing catalogs (I have been using them for at
least 20-25 years), I assume the same can be done with any program that has
support for printing custom designed address labels.
But a better solution might be to just use the database application and a
suitable "report generator". Then what you need to design is just the
template for the report generator. I have been doing this with MS Access
for 20-25 years too.
(My use of MS Office is at work, where I have no control of what software
is installed, privately I prefer to tro to use FOSS as much as possible.)

I kind of agree with both sides... Scribus is a great tool for
processing the layout of virtually anything. But you need to have the
text prepped for the process. If this is a big and recurring project, it
might be worth the effort to tweak the scripting to have it working. If
it's a smaller project or only a one-off project, you would be better
off with something like LibreOffice (or MS Office if that's your
horsehouse). It will have easier solutions to quickly generate output -
but will miss out on details like professional grade kerning or high
quality PDF documents.
So basically it's up to you... Scribus is a great tool in the Linux
philosophy: do one thing and do it great + work together with other
great tools for added functionality.
All the best,
Jurgen Gaeremyn
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[Gregory Pittman]

Post by Matt Hixson
I'm tentatively looking for a tool that could replace the current
software we use for paginating our phone books. From what I'm told the
hardest problem is just flowing the entries around variable sized ads.
https://www.actionyp.com/prescott,az/a/1/book/
When one of those ads changes or the size of a heading is changed it
affects how the whole book flows. Is pagination something that Scribus
does naturally or does even that require some scripting?

I think you would end up doing a mixture of scripts, along with some
manual tweaking afterward.

If it were me, I would approach this by starting with the text entries,
loading the information, then creating pages with a 3-column format,
with text frames linked.

The ads and the headings can be done in a similar way that the Infobox
script works -- this is included with Scribus. You might play around
with it to see how it works. An infobox can contain text, or could be an
image, and can fill 1, 2, or 3 columns, and be placed and sized as you
wish. It's also easy once they're created to adjust position and height
of the frame in Properties. All of these kinds of infoboxes will have
Text Flows Around Frame set. Inserting these frames then automatically
pushes the listings down the pages.

You would want to create Paragraph Styles. This could be scripted as well.

The colorchart script that Christoph gave the link for shows how to have
lines of text in a file, then parse that into Python lists, to be used
as needed, in your case for the lines of information with either
headings or names and phone numbers. The structure of your text file
would allow Python to differentiate headings from names and phone
numbers, perhaps based on the number of items in a line from the file,
using a tab as a separator.

It's worth manually playing with some of your listings, maybe a page to
two, so that you get a sense of what style settings are useful.

Greg


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[Peter Nermander]

Post by Peter Nermander
It's a matter of what you define as "desktop publishing", at least MS Word
has excellent features for doing catalogs (I have been using them for at
least 20-25 years), I assume the same can be done with any program that has
support for printing custom designed address labels.

I can give an example. A couple of years ago I made a booklet with karaoke
songs using the following workflow:

1. All songs tagged with MP3 tags
2. Using a program called MP3Tag (which I also used to correct tags) I
exported the list of songs to CSV
3. Using MS Word I spent 30 minutes developing a two column template, with
page header showing the first (on the left) and the last (on the right)
initial letters. This template hade the song name in bold, followed by the
artist in regular (or vice versa for the second run) on the same line,
followed by the length of the song in italics.
4. I made two runs with Word's Mail Merge, one ordered on song names and
one ordered on performed name
5. I made the front page separately, then printed to PDF

The list is more than 3000 songs, the work in total took me maybe 3 hours,
but that included fixing some incorrect tags (for example some songs had a
leading space).

Sure, I might not get the same kerning support as in Scribus, but really,
for a phone book? It's not a novel.

/Peter
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[ale rimoldi]

hi peter

Post by Peter Nermander
Sure, I might not get the same kerning support as in Scribus, but
really, for a phone book? It's not a novel.

congratulations for the achievement!
finishing it in 3 hours is very good!

in the past i have created myself a scribus python script
for importing data from a csv file and create the printed schedule for
an event. several days and several tracks in parallel.
it has been extended by other people over the years and the result
have been pretty amazing.

again, a similar task as a phone book or a list of mp3.

my experience is, that as soon as you want to do more fancy things
(often as simple as adding ads at random places) it's worth to go for
scribus...
for an internal phone book i think that libreoffice is more than
enough... if you want to publish and "sell" a phone book you will
probably prefer scribus (even if the scribus scripting misses a few key
commands).
but for getting scribus to shine you will likely need basic python
skills. if you're going to use a general mail merger, you won't probably
see/feel much of a difference (except if you manually heavily tweak the
rersult in scribus after the import!).

ciao
a.l.e

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[Albrecht Will]

For a lager scribus-file with a lot of ingredients I have a long waiting
period. One reason could be, that scribus uses only one core.
Is there any chance to improve it?



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[Gregory Pittman]

Post by Albrecht Will
For a lager scribus-file with a lot of ingredients I have a long waiting
period. One reason could be, that scribus uses only one core.
Is there any chance to improve it?

Hi Albrecht,

What I see when I check this with KSysGuard is that in my dual-core
machine both cores are used but sequentially (and mostly only one at a
time), and this seems to be the way that my computer works with all
sorts of tasks. Even my Windows VM does this, so it may not be Scribus
that is the source of how the cores are used.

Greg


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[ale rimoldi]

hoi albrecht

Post by Albrecht Will
For a lager scribus-file with a lot of ingredients I have a long
waiting period. One reason could be, that scribus uses only one core.
Is there any chance to improve it?

scribus is single threaded and i fear that there are very little chance
to see this change in the foreseeable future.

yes, getting scribus to do its work in multiple threads would be very
welcome, but i fear that we will need a new contributor putting a
relevant amount of time into it before seeing a progress in that
direction...

have a look at how much work it took firefox to get multithreading
inside of their application... and then inside of a single tab...
(not sure, but i think that they now have multithreaded the css
engine... and for getting there, they "invented" a new programming
language...)

ciao
a.l.e

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[Peter Nermander]

Post by ale rimoldi
my experience is, that as soon as you want to do more fancy things
(often as simple as adding ads at random places) it's worth to go for
scribus...

Even MS Word has support for wrapping text around text frames. No problem
inserting a text frame or image with an ad and have the text automatically
flow around it.

One of the powers with Word is that it is excellent at on the fly reflowing
of content.

/Peter
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[Rolf-Werner Eilert]

Post by Peter Nermander

Post by ale rimoldi
my experience is, that as soon as you want to do more fancy things
(often as simple as adding ads at random places) it's worth to go for
scribus...

Even MS Word has support for wrapping text around text frames. No problem
inserting a text frame or image with an ad and have the text automatically
flow around it.
One of the powers with Word is that it is excellent at on the fly reflowing
of content.
/Peter

That's news to me, Peter. From my own experience, LibreOffice's Writer
is much better here, while Word still tends to mess up everything at
random situations. This is especially true for long texts. For the
everage secretary's letter of, say, three pages, Word is good. But it is
still definitely deprecated to be used for students' works, and there is
good reason for it. So I wouldn't dare to emphasize it for a phonebook.

I would even consider Writer the better tool for this task if you invent
a decent set of paragraph styles for it. Scribus might fail in case of
long texts due to its long operating times for longer concatenated text
frames.

Rolf


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[Ralf Mattes]

Post by Gregory Pittman

Post by Albrecht Will
For a lager scribus-file with a lot of ingredients I have a long waiting
period. One reason could be, that scribus uses only one core.
Is there any chance to improve it?

Hi Albrecht,
What I see when I check this with KSysGuard is that in my dual-core
machine both cores are used but sequentially (and mostly only one at a
time), and this seems to be the way that my computer works with all
sorts of tasks.

That's just your OS that might shift a task from one core to the next.
Unless you run with a high load that's no problem (the OS might even do this
during _low_ system load so that both cores get the same amount of work to
prevent heat differences in the CPU).

Post by Gregory Pittman
Even my Windows VM does this, so it may not be Scribus
that is the source of how the cores are used.

From my recent code browsing I'd say that the main reason for Scribus'
devastating performance break-down for even moderatly sized story texts
is the underlying data model ... :-/

Cheers, RalfD

Post by Gregory Pittman
Greg
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[ale rimoldi]

hi ralf

Post by Ralf Mattes
From my recent code browsing I'd say that the main reason for Scribus'
devastating performance break-down for even moderatly sized story
texts is the underlying data model ... :-/

well, if you found a way to improve the data model and solve this, i
think that people will be glad to hear your suggestions : - )

from what i know, the issue is rather that it is hard to know what
should be recalculated when a text frame is edited.
in doubt, scribus recalculates (and eventually redraws) everything that
could have changed, instead of trying to figure out what could have
been affected.

i think that contributions improving the reflowing of the text would be
very welcome!
such work is not trivial, but might be doable!

ciao
a.l.e

p.s.: you're not completely wrong in your analysis, the first step in
such an optimization would probably be: putting in the data model on
which page item is placed... and which part of text belongs to which
frame... but i think that it's not the hardest part...
another welcome improvement would be to make it easy to move the text
and images back and forth from disk to memory... also a related issue...

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