Writing Invites with Scribus

So I recently had to create a whole bunch of invites. Not a huge number like a thousand, but more than enough that I didn't want to make each one individually. Anyway, I decided to make them in Scribus. It's semi-professional, and has grade-A output. After the fact, I'd say that it was a pretty good choice, except for a few annoying wrinkles.

The Good

On the good side, Scribus is really stringent about printing issues (though that wasn't as much of a concern this time). It's really good at getting you to use proper fonts. And I really love the ability to use math in any entry field. OK, this doesn't seem like a lot, but overall it's pretty good, and I don't want to go listing out everything!

The Bad

The reason why I say it's only semi-professional is because of these wrinkles. There was one annoying crash, but fortunately, it went away after an upgrade. The real problems are mostly non-intuitiveness, where things don't happen how you'd like. I'm having a hard time remembering them as I think I've grown accustomed to it all. Actually, one thing I remember is that the style editor acts very oddly. If you're editing styles, the style information never stays in sync with the style you have selected. Nine times out of ten (I made that stat up), stuff will be disabled as if you've selected a built-in non-editable style even when you haven't. Oh, and the undo stack is pretty weird. Why does Scribus seem to think I've edited the document when I just saved and Scribus isn't even in focus!

The Ugly

However, out of all things, I think the most disappointing was the scripting API. I mean, automating stuff was one of the things I hoped to do. I did eventually get that done, but it was not fun getting there, and took way too long.

Originally, I planned to create a template, and then write a script which created a Scribus file for each invite. This idea didn't work out at all as the importing broke stuff. That's OK, because then I had the better idea of using a Master Page, with each invite as a separate page. Scribus has the ability to export each page separately, so this worked out well. I could put everything on the Master Page except the small bit with the name which would be different for each page.

The problems really arise from the fact that the scripting API is not well thought-out. It may use Python, but it's not at all Pythonic. It's not even self-consistent. When you change an object's properties, you can specify its name, or work with the mysterious "selection". That selection could be a whole object, or it could be some text within the object. Sometimes, after calling a function, the selection is gone! Exporting to a PDF involves a PDFfile object, while nowhere else is a class used.

Scribus files seem to be XML, but the scripting API does not take any advantage of that. All you get is a handful of top-level functions, and stuff to modify that mysterious selection. It's really too bad, because with a proper object model, I'm sure you could do some really cool stuff.

The End

In the end, I did end up with a script that worked. It was based of the mail-merge script on the Scribus wiki. It didn't do what I originally wanted, but it did get the job done. And of course, the invites did turn out awesome.

But after trying that, going back to VBA in MS Office was a bit of a relief.