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

Frame conversion and text to outlines


Anytime you have to test a new software, the first things you'll see are the defaults. You have to work for some time with them to adapt your workflow to the available tools and take advantage of the specificities.

In Scribus, frames are central. Adobe InDesign, in some ways tries to avoid them by using a single tool for text edit and text frame, and at the same time it can import pictures without requiring a frame. But in any case, a frame is made even if automatically. We've also seen in Scribus that tables are a kind of group of generated frames. The easy part is that there is nothing special to learn to use and format tables.

Another good feature with Scribus frames is that they can easily be converted to any other kind of frame. So, if you created a Text Frame and want to put an image into it, you can still do so without deleting and drawing a new frame. This is very important because the default frame shape is set to rectangle and cannot be changed...