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

PDF interaction


We've seen previously how we can add some forms into a PDF file. We have already shown how it was possible to add some JavaScript to display some information when the file is opened in the viewer. JavaScript can be used to add interaction in the PDF too. Many things could be done using JavaScript, such as video controls or 3D modeling and viewing. But as Scribus is a layout software it won't be useful to add all this.

In Scribus, it will be more interesting to define simple actions, such as form field calculations and data transfer by e-mail, or with any kind of server-side language connection like PHP that could add data to a MySQL database.

Teaching these languages is out of the scope of this book. In the following example, we will just show you some tips on how to implement them in Scribus. But the learning will be long if you don't know them yet. Just do some research on the Internet with keywords, such as PHP and JavaScript, and you'll find many websites or books to...