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 - distorting a shape


Mesh distortion is a nice and easy feature that let's you interact with your frame's sides with the help of some special handles.

  1. To modify a frame or a shape, just select it and go to Item | Path Tools | Mesh Distortion.

  2. A window will appear. The selected frame or shape is displayed inside a grid too and has some circle handles.

  3. Dragging those handles will distort the grid and the shape as well. Take the third handle of the second row and drag it down.

  4. Take the third handle of the third row and drag it down too.

  5. You then just have to adapt other handles to make them nicer and smoother.

What just happened?

Dragging handles just distorts the shape by the same amount as the grid. The current active handle is displayed with a red fill, whereas the inactive handles are kept with a single red stroke.

By watching the position of the handles or the shape of the grid, one can see what changes have been made. In the example, we have mostly moved the two middle handles...