Graphicslab's blog

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Scribus Arcs

By a.l.e on 2011-01-09 17:00
[Scribus, Scribus16]

After the Paris meeting last November, the development of Scribus has shown lot of fresh energy. Several long standing bugs have been fixed, long waited features have been implemented, a new Website is being set up (already online, but lot of details still to clean up), the Wiki is being recategorized... and -- finally -- the team seems to come closer and closer to release Scribus 1.4.

One example? This week Franz has added a feature request Christoph has filled four years ago: Arcs.

The new tool is still a bit rough, but it's already usable!

Now, we only have to wait for somebody coming up with a script to play Pacman inside of Scribus...

... and we certainly will get one to draw Pies!

Panettone for Scribus

By a.l.e on 2011-01-06 16:15
[Scribus, Colors]

One of the additions to Scribus 1.4 will be a lot of new Color Palettes... but one will be missing.

While Christmas was getting closer and closer, I was wondering if we shouldn't at least have a Panettone Color Palette:

Somebody was faster than me: Olivier Berten has announced his new script Pantone.py, which runs inside of Scribus, has a nice interface and downloads the Colors directly from the Pantone website. Check it out!

Let's see who will be first to sue us: Bauli or Pantone?

Buona Befana!

Adding a new Command to the Scribus Scripter

By a.l.e on 2011-01-04 09:31 PM
[Scribus, Scripter]

After having seen the architecture behind a Scripter Command will now add our first simple command to the Scribus Scripter.

It will be called repeatText and it will get the text in a frame and repeat it n times.

This command takes the number of repetitions and the name of the frame (optionally) as parameter, reads the content of the text frame and inserts n times the text into the frame.
Probably a useless command, but it's almost a perfect one to understand how the Scripter can be enhanced.

We will begin by registering the new command in scriptplugin.cpp (which -- as all the other files we will modify -- is located in [scribus14/]scribus/plugins/scriptplugin):

span style="color: #666666;">"repeatText"

We will add it right after the definition of setText (which at the time of writing is at line 468).

The command itself goes into the cmdtext.cpp file (since it's related to the text handling). Before writing the function itself, we will have to define its header in cmdtext.h (similarly to what we did in scriptplugin we will add it right after the definition for setboxtext, which is the definition for the setText command):
/*! docstring */"repeatText(n, [\"name\"])\n\
\n\
Repeat the text of the text frame \"name\" n times.\n\
If \"name\" is not given the currently selected item is used.\n\
"));
/*! Repeat text */
PyObject *scribus_repeattext(PyObject * /*self*/, PyObject* args);

In cmdtext.cpp we can add the function which will contain the code for the command:
PyObject *scribus_repeattext(PyObject* /* self */

In order to avoid a warning ‘scribus_repeattext__doc__’ defined but not used, we have to add our newly defined doc string (cribus_repeattext__doc__) to the cmdtextdocwarnings() method at the end of cmdtext.cpp.

Now, we are ready to do a first compilation of the code: it won't do anything (since we have not written any code) but it should not spit out any error, either.
In the build directory for the scripter plugin (if you haven't defined differently, it's the directory where the source code is located) you can now run make and cross your fingers.
The output of make should look similar to:
 

Now you're ready to do a make install and start your Scribus!
If you activate the Console in the Script menu, you can now type our new repeatText command.


In the next post (and last one for this series) we will implement the code for the repeatText command.
The architecture of a new Command for the Scribus' Scripter
By a.l.e on 2010-12-27  21:43

[Scribus, Scripter]

We have seen how the Scripter Commands are defined, in this second article we will go through the steps which are necessary to add a command to the Scribus Scripter.

In order to add a new command to the Scribus' Scripter you will have to go through three steps:

In scriptplugin.cpp add to the scribus_methods array the call to the function:
{const_cast<char*>("newFancyCommand"), scribus_newfancycommand, METH_VARARGS, tr(scribus_newfancycommand__doc__)},
this will define the new Scripter command newFancyCommand(), which is attached to the Scribus' function scribus_newfancycommand() and is described through the documentation string scribus_newfancycommand__doc__
Add to the header file of the  "commands collection" (in our case cmdtext.h)

  
the documentation string for the command and
  
the signature for the new command; the will always return a PyObject, have as the first parameter a reference to the containing class and have a dummy parameter args which will contain the values passed to the function:
PyObject *scribus_newfancycommand(PyObject * /*self*/, PyObject *args);


The implementation of the new command goes into the .cpp file corresponding to the header file we have just enhanced:


span style="color: #ff0000; font-style: italic;">/* self */"dd"

We will explain later what all this means: for now, you should just know that we have defined a new command which expects two numeric parameters, does nothing and returns nothing.

There are some conventions which should be followed when naming the new commands:

the function name will always start with scribus_, has its name written without any spaces (and other separators), all in lower cases.
the command name is written with Camel Case, with no separator


Finally, it's a good idea to take an existing patch for the Scripter, study it and try to understand what has to be patched to add a new command. One good example is:
0008650: Patch adding two new Scripter API functions
Enhancing the Scribus Scripter
By a.l.e on 2010-12-21 10:00

[Scribus, Scripter]


We are starting today a set of articles on the internals of the Scribus Scripter. This first article will teach you how to find where a Scripter command is defined, read it's source code and -- eventually -- tweak it.

First: what is the Scripter? It's the Scribus plugin which allows to run Python scripts inside of Scribus and let them interact with Scribus documents.

You'll first have to download the current source code for Scribus 1.4 and compile it:

 

It's not the subject of this article to teach you how to use Subversion or how to compile Scribus: if you don't understand the commands above, please refer to the Howto in the Scribus Wiki.

The Source code for the Scripter is located in [scribus14/]scribus/plugins/scriptplugin. You may open them and have a short look around.

The Scripter commands are defined in the files with the extension .cpp and starting with cmd, obj, and in the two files svgimport.cpp and guiapp.cpp.

It's not always easy to guess where a command is defined. The best way is to

Search in the file scriptplugin.cpp for the line which defines the Scripter command. If you look for "setFontSize" you will find the following matching line:
{const_cast<char*>("setFontSize"), scribus_setfontsize, METH_VARARGS, tr(scribus_setfontsize__doc__)},
This is the line which adds to the Scripter the setFontSize() command, by attaching it to the scribus_setfontsize() function.

Once you have found the name of the Scribus internal function, you can look for it in the .cpp files in the scripter directory. In the case of setFontSize
grep scribus_setfontsize *.cpp
will tell you that setFontSize is defined in the cmdtext.cpp file.

In the cmdtext.cpp file you can read how setFontSize() works:

PyObject *scribus_setfontsize(PyObject* /* self */"""d|es", &size, "utf-8""Font size out of bounds - must be 1 <= size <= 512.","python error""Cannot set font size on a non-text frame.","python error"

Even with just some basic knowledges of C++ (or C, Java, Python, ...) you should be able to read through that code, roughly understand what it does and maybe even do a simple fix.

But if you want to do some serious work you will have to learn a bit more about how to work with that part of the Scribus code.
The next step will be to learn how to add a very simple new command to the Scribus Scripter.
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