I recently had a problem with text I was preparing with Scribus desktop publisher. I needed a number of Semitic words, which I was easily able to copy and paste into the story editor. They looked fine there, but when I clicked the green check (okay) icon, the words were spelled backward in their text boxes. Scribus apparently only recognizes languages which are written left to right; most Semitic languages are written right to left.
This is a known bug for Scribus, which means developers know it’s something that needs to be fixed and should be working on. Being open source, however, development is done on a voluntary basis. That means that unless the problem is an urgent one which effects many users, a fix may be slow in the making.
Thankfully, someone wrote a script for this problem. A script is a bit of computer code which accomplishes a specific task or series of tasks. That meant all I had to do was copy the code and install it into Scribus. But how?
I found help at the Floss Manual website, Scribus – Scripter and Scripts. It was a simple matter of copying and pasting the script into a text editor, and saving as a .py file. Python is the language in which many scripts are written.
When I need to use the menu, I access it from Scribus’s Script menu. The first time I had to choose “execute script” and browse to the folder I saved the script in. After that, it showed up under Script > Recent Scripts.
Initially I pasted the Hebrew words into the English paragraph. I learned the executing the script flipped the entire contents of the text frame! I had to go through each frame, cut the specific word, and put it in its own text frame. It’s a bit of work but worth it for the final result.
For more information on Scribus scripts (and a list of useful scripts), visit the scripts page at the Scribus wiki.
