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

Dealing with special characters


Special characters are really well known. Many people like to play with them because they can give a nice aspect to some character. In Scribus, special characters are really easy to add. We've already added some, such as automatic page numbers or smart hyphens. Yes, these are not the most appealing but they are special characters.

In fact we should split special characters into two categories:

  • Characters that are being considered as typographic needs or good rules will be available in the Insert menu. Character, Quote, Spaces & Breaks, and Ligatures are menu entries where you can find more. Since they add a character, the frame has to be in Content Edit mode to make these menus available.

  • If you want to add a special (somewhat funny) letter as you would do in a text processor, you can use the Scribus Insert | Glyph window. Some of the most common, such as copyright or trademark, are in the Insert | Character menu too.

Notice that you have the same Insert...