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

Moving objects and exact positioning


Now that each object has been imported, drawn, or written we still need to work on the graphical aspect of the card. As of now:

  • The logo is too big and overlaps the shape

  • The text is not nicely formatted

  • Shapes and frames have been manually placed: the missing precision is bad for such an important document that may get printed in the thousands

Placing with snapping options

Basically, moving an object is as easy as selecting it with the Select Item tool C, and dragging it by keeping the left mouse button pressed. But once again the position will be quite approximated. For more precision we will use the Page | Snap to Guides menu. Now move the pink shape again and try to make the top border of it match the top margin. Of course, you don't see where you go so you can temporarily use the Colors tab of the PP (Properties Palette F2), click on the Edit Fill Color button and temporarily set 50 as the opacity of the shape. Move the shape again as described previously...