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

Guides


Guides are very different things: these are helpers which give you an easy way to place objects where you like.

Guides can be placed manually by pressing the mouse button in a ruler and dragging them onto the page. The guide is placed when the mouse button is released. It can be moved afterwards with the Select Item tool (C key).

Tip

Can't see the guides!

If you don't see the guides, select View | Show Guides or verify that the display is not in Preview Mode (in the View menu).

If a guide is placed in a master page, it will appear on each page on which the master page will be applied. It is really useful if you want to place a Text Frame or Image Frame at the same place on several pages.

The difficult part of this is that it is difficult to place a guide very precisely, for example, at the middle of the page. The Page | Manage Guides window helps you position guides according to a precise value (Single tab) or create several well distributed (Column/Row tab) guides at once.