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

The three ways of changing a property


In Scribus you can change the properties in several ways:

  • Using defined text styles

  • Using local modifications on the selected text with the text tab of the PP (F2)

  • The overall frame content when the frame itself, and not the content, is selected

The third option is very practical to work very quickly on a small document, but it is certainly not the most productive in all use cases. The best workflow will be to apply paragraph styles, then apply character styles, and then local formatting. In this chapter you'll see all the advantages you can get by using styles.

In fact the third method can sometimes put your work in great danger. Think of you having set everything nicely. You do one or two changes on other frames and want to come back on this one that you had already set. You will have to double-click on that frame to go into the Content Edit mode and do the changes. But what if double-click doesn't work well? The content will not be selected, but the frame...