Running Scribus Generator from the command line

As running Scribus Generator from the command line is currently the only option for Mac users, below is a short introduction that may help. It works just the same way for Linux users, and nearly just so for Windows users.

what is the command line

• http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/introduction-to-the-mac-os-x-command-line
• https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/how-use-terminal-on-mac-3608274/

running Scribus Generator from the command line

After reading the documents above, let's imagine that your SLA template and CSV data are in your folder Documents/scribus, and that you downloaded ScribusGenerator-master.zip from Github (or the Python3 version ScribusGenerator-python3.zip for Scribus 1.5.6+) and uncompressed it in your folder Downloads/ScribusGenerator-master. You would then

1. open a Terminal
2. go to your project directory: cd ~/Documents/scribus
3. create a shortcut to Scribus Generator (SG, in short) in your project folder: ln -s ~/Downloads/ScribusGenerator-master/ScribusGeneratorCLI.py .
4. check that SG works: ./ScribusGeneratorCLI.py --outDir test Business_Card.sla. This step should create 10 SLA files with a business card in the Documents/scribus/test folder in less than a second.
5. understand the available options to run SG from the command line (they are basically the same as the GUI), either online or directly from your command line:
   ./ScribusGeneratorCLI.py --help
6. invent a command that will suit your needs, maybe something like: ./ScribusGeneratorCLI.py --csvFile newsletterData.csv --outDir . --outName "newsApril_%VAR_name%" newsletterTemplate.sla (in one single line!, to generate a different SLA document for each recipient based on their name), or ./ScribusGeneratorCLI.py --csvFile newsletterData.csv --outDir . --merge newsletterTemplate.sla (in one single line!) to generate a single SLA files with all your data entries.
7. open the generated SLA files with Scribus to enjoy the result... and generate a pdf or an image out of it.

If you want more help to create a particular command don't hesitate to give me a few more details on your particular needs in a new issue... We'll make a collection of those on this wiki ;)

generate PDF from command line

A useful next step is then to generate PDF documents out of all the SLA documents, once you checked them out. For that purpose

1. download the to-pdf.py script by Ale Rimoldi, into your Downloads/ folder.
2. go to your project directory: cd ~/Documents/scribus
3. run the script to generate PDF documents from all SLA files in the current directory scribus -g -py ~/Downloads/to-pdf.py -- *.sla

This step may take a while if you have many files, nothing I can do. Just tell the people at Scribus how important it is they make that process less obstructive by joining the discussion here.