Book Image

Scribus 1.3.5: Beginner's Guide

4 (1)
Book Image

Scribus 1.3.5: Beginner's Guide

4 (1)

Overview of this book

Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning and inexpensive professional page layout to desktop computers with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Creating professional-looking documents using Scribus is not a cakewalk, especially with so many features at your disposal, it’s hard to know where to get started! Scribus Beginners guide walks users step by step through common projects, such as creating a brochure,newsletter, business cards and so on. It also includes guidelines on starting a web newsletter and online PDF (Adobe Acrobat format) newsletter along with basic scripting to extend Scribus as per your requirements. This book begins with the simplest tasks and brings you progressively to adapt your workflow to the most efficient tools. It commences with the description of the graphic tool chain and an overall chapter on how to draw a simple and attractive business card. You'll then see how to manage the pages of your document and organized their structure thanks to guides. Then being invited to fill them with text, you'll be able to import, set text style as well as use replacement and hyphenation tool. Pictures or vector drawing will be added to the documents too. You'll be taught to choose the best format at the best time, modify or distort the shapes to get very custom documents. You will also learn how Scribus handles advanced color features such as transparencies, overprinting, spot colors precisely and be sure they are set well for a print result without bad surprise. At the end, you'll know to produce a perfect PDF file, be it for print jobs or web with effects, buttons and javascript interactivity, extend the document capacities as well as Scribus tools with simple programming especially with the python language.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Scribus 1.3.5 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 11. Customizing the Creation or Viewing Process

Even if it is not the main goal, Scribus has many features to help enhance user experience. We can analyze it from two points of view.

For the reader, the document author can add some basic interactivity with buttons, links, or transitions.

For the author themselves, they will be able to use the power of open source by customizing Scribus source code, adding Python scripts to automate some tasks, or defining how the interactivity will work within the PDF document using JavaScript.

Most of the options we will deal with in this chapter won't have much impact on the printing result. But they can be a handy approach for the people who have to play with the document in some ways, generally with repetitive actions.

In this chapter, we see in detail how to:

  • Add links or bookmarks

  • Add buttons and fields

  • Have auto-generated content in the PDF with JavaScript

  • Perform repetitive actions with Python scripts, especially importing content from an external...