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

Light-weight PDFs


Scribus PDFs are quite heavy. And if you produce a web PDF with a standard Scribus export to Web options, you'll see that your file can take long to download because Scribus is mainly made to create print documents, for which the quality criteria will be very different. If you want the PDF files to be easily available on your website, it's particularly important to make them as light as possible to decrease download duration.

Reducing the size of your Scribus PDF will require the modification of some options here and there, especially in the PDF Export dialog. In fact, there is no absolute way to do it. It depends on the result that you want and the content of the file.

First of all, reduce the number of primary colors. If you need to print or display only in black, just use Grayscale PDF in the Color tab of the PDF Export dialog. If you want a web PDF, Screen/Web will be enough and avoid the use of the fourth primary and spot colors. Our postcard export to the Web instead...