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 - adding and setting the color of a shape


You'll use shapes when you need a decorative graphical element that is simple enough and is not worth using specific software for, and when this shape doesn't have to receive any content.

The basic shape element of a layout is the rectangle. Chapter 7 will show you how to add more advanced shapes: in most cases simple shapes like rectangles and circles will be enough.

  1. Pick the Insert Shape tool in the toolbar or press the S key. Draw a rectangle so that it covers the bottom half of the card. You can draw on the card if you want —remember the card will be cropped.

    Tip

    Shortcuts and Text Frame

    Scribus uses simple keys (such as T, S, and I) when not in Edit mode.

    When you're using keyboard shortcuts, verify that you're not in Content Edit mode. Otherwise, the key you'll press will be added to the frame content. One simple tip is to click on an empty place of the layout to deselect everything or pick the Select Item tool (arrow in the toolbar...