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

Time for action - using a predefined script to reduce file size


If you run a Linux machine, you should try a simple script:

  1. Go to http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Reduce_the_size_of_Scribus_generated_PDFs.

  2. Copy all the code you find on that page and paste it into a text editor and save it with the extension .py as reduce_PDF_size.py. If you don't have an Internet connection, use the code provided in the code bundle.

  3. Go to Script | Execute Script, pick your script and follow the instructions.

What just happened?

The script is a list of several tasks that can be redone each time the script is launched. Scripts are handy ways to handle repetitive series of actions in Scribus. They are written in Python. You won't actually need to know how exactly that script works—just focus on the result.

Our sample document is exported to a 307KB PDF with a better average quality than we got with other methods. It was the case that some other files got heavier. We think it's worth a try because its much simpler...