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 - how Scribus applies changes


To test the difference between Preferences and Document Setup, let's follow some simple steps, in which we will change the document size and language and see how it reacts:

  1. You have an empty, new A4 document in Scribus.

  2. Go to File menu and choose Preferences.

  3. In the General category, which should be the current category, look for the Language list and change it to Chinese or any other language that you prefer.

  4. Click on the Apply button at the bottom of the window and you should see the changes. You'll now be able to follow any of the tutorials you'll find on the Web, or nearly all. Unless you're comfortable with the Confucius language, set the language back to English and apply.

  5. Go to the Document category, the next one, and change the Units to Millimeters(mm) and eventually the page size to A5.

  6. Click on Apply again and you will see that nothing changes. For units, it is really easy to look at the left-hand part of the status bar. It should display pt or any other option that you have chosen in the new document window. Close the Preferences window by clicking on OK and choose the units list of the status bar. Your choice will still have an A4 page.

  7. Go to Page | Insert and you'll see that A4 is still the default.

  8. On the other hand, you can now choose Document Setup in the File menu and change the Document category in the same way you did before. Click on OK.

  9. Nothing changes right now. But once you go to Page | Insert, you should see that the new page is set as A5. Just test it.

What just happened?

The Preferences will apply in two ways, mainly depending on the settings you have changed:

  • The settings that change a document behavior will be applied to any new document that is created after the modifications

  • The settings that only adapt Scribus behavior can be applied immediately by clicking on the Apply button

When changing a document property, Scribus won't adapt the existing pages by itself. If it did, you would have to make a new layout, so it lets you define whether the old pages need to be changed. It is very safe and having several page sizes in a document is made easy. It doesn't mean that it has to be done everytime, but it's easy because everything can be set separately.