Notes on Importing HTML into Scribus

Scribus has an HTML importer which can import clean, well formed HTML and retain much of the layout and and formatting, provided the formatting or styling is basic HTML in the HTML markup, not via css style sheets. CSS support will come in the future.

So what kind of HTML is supported and how does it work ?

Upon import, the importer will create paragraph styles which correspond to the html markup. Bold, Italics and monospace text and alignment are also supported. Below is a listing of the HTML markup supported - both upper and lower case tags.

body, div, a - Text must be within the <body> tags.
p and br - Corresponding to paragraph and line breaks.
H1 to H4 - Correspond to Heading Sizes 1 to 4.
ol,ul,li - Corresponding to ordered or unordered lists.
pre and code - Corresponding to preformatted text and source code listings. These will be converted to text using the fixed pitch font Courier.
www. style web links are converted to text with blue coloring to highlight them in the same manner as most web browsers do in their default settings.
b, u, i, em, strong,sub.sup,del,u - Text formatting is converted to the corresponding font styles. Note, your default font should have all of these variants available to Scribus.

Hence the following section of html will display and create paragraph styles in Scribus as demonstrated below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title></title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>H1 Text</h1>
<h2>H2 Text</h2>
<h3>H3 Text</h3>
<h4>H4 Text</h4>
<ol>
<li>Ordered List Item 1  </li>
<li>Ordered List Item 2  </li>
 </ol>
 <ul>
<li>Un-Ordered List Item 1  </li>
 <li>Un-Ordered List Item 2  </li>
 </ul>
 <code>code listings</code>
 <p><b>Bold Paragraph Style</b></p>
 <p><i>Italic Paragraph Style</i></p>
 <p align="center">Centered Text</p>
</body>
</html>

Below the imported styles from the file above.

Below is the imported text displayed on the canvas:

Not all applications export HTML with high fidelity to the W3C specifications. You can use htmltidy to clean up and make conformant HTML text you need to import. See : http://w3c.org