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

Drawing polygons


The Insert Polygon tool (P) will add shapes too. But instead of having a predefined list of elements, you'll create your own thanks to some settings. Polygons can be defined when using the Polygon Properties. Click on the arrow to the right-hand side of the Insert Polygon tool icon and then choose Properties in the menu that appears.

  • Corners specifies how many sides you need. The default is 4 but can be increased to 999 (having so many sides is unnecessary for your polygon and will look like a circle at this point).

  • Rotation will turn your shape. It's the less important setting of this window because the rotation can be done afterwards, on the page, with the Rotation value in the PP or using the Rotate Item tool.

  • The Apply Factor checkbox just activates the last few options. It's interesting when you want to deactivate them all and come back to your regular polygon.

  • Factor will divide the sides in the middle and increase or decrease the radius at this point so that you can...