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 - working with styles


For working with styles it will be very practical to improve the whole text formatting of our layout, so let's go back to our "All's Well That Ends Well" example.

  1. Create a Double sided document that's 4 inches wide and 6.7 inches high. Select the Automatic Text Frames checkbox.

  2. Import the sample text we downloaded from http://manybooks.net/titles/shakespeetext982ws3010.html. If you have a tool that can clean up blank lines, use it. The text will be much easier to set later. On Unix-like environments, it can be done using cat original.txt | sed '/^$/d' >final.txt.

  3. Then go to Page | Insert and choose 150 pages at End.

  4. We can now use the Style Manager from Edit | Styles. Right click on the Paragraph Styles list and choose New Paragraph Style.

  5. In the right-hand part of the window, give it a name, (for example, Standard) go to Character Style tab and choose a 10pt font size.

  6. Go back to the Properties tab and decrease Fixed Linespacing to 12.

  7. Click on Apply and...