Elvis Stansvik continues his Google Summer of Code project working on real tables tool in Scribus. Even though most features are currently available via scripts only, there already is some user interface available.

Here is a short demo, and comments go below.

There already exists API for controlling cell width, padding, border color and border line style. You can also merge cells from Python console. Basic work on table and cell styles is done as well.

As for user interface, at this time you can draw new tables and change border formatting directly, as well as cell fill (for the whole table only so far). Table and cell styles have already been exposed in Styles Manager, but not a lot can be edited yet (which is quite easy to fix though).

Scribus team is quite lucky to get Elvis working on tables: he already did a very similar project for KWord (KOffice/Calligra Suite) in the past, so he knew from the very beginning scope and complexity of such a project, and, what's more important, has useful related experience at hand.

If you are brave enough to compile source code and want to check the progress periodically, you can clone Elvis's Git repository:

$ git clone git://scribus.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/scribus/gsoc11tables

Supporting tables across the whole spread (facing pages) is unfortunately out of scope of the project, but will be addressed at a later time.

Elvis publishes his weekly reports in Scribus wiki, and you can also read his blog. The work is supposed to be finished by the end of August this year, and it looks like the new Tables tool has quite a lot of chances to be part of Scribus v1.5.0.

More on this topic:

• Getting CMYK colors from Inkscape to Scribus for printing
• What's new in Scribus 1.3.5
• Interview with Scribus team, 2006
• GSoC2011: what's up with Inkscape
• Google Summer of Code 2011 is over