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

Changing the stack of objects


The pink shape is the last object that we've added, so it has been placed on top of the others. We will need to change the stack and move this object to the background.

Activate the Properties Palette by pressing F2 and have a look at the XYZ tab. This tab has some interesting information: we will go through some of them right now. Presently, the most interesting information is the little number displayed at the right-hand side of the green bold arrows in the Level category. If inline icons are inactive, click on the shape to be sure that you have the right information.

The number 7 means that there are six objects below this one. Since we have only three objects on the business card (logo, Text Frame, and this shape), you may wonder where this 7 comes from. The logo is composed of four shapes, which Scribus keeps grouped together.

How can we send the shape to the background? We have four actions and three ways to apply them: the buttons in the Properties Palette...