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

Drawing basic shapes


Converting text to a frame was on how to get a custom frame shape from something we already knew perfectly, that is, text inserted or typed in a frame, and without having to draw anything manually. There are tools specifically dedicated to that part of the work. Shapes and Polygons are really made for this purpose. In the toolbar, the Insert Shape icon is the white shadowed rectangle placed to the right-hand side of the Insert Table tool and the Insert Polygon tool (the pentagon).

You can see there are black arrows next to them. The arrows will display a menu that will give you many choices to get a nice result.

As a first step, click on the arrow to the right-hand side of the Insert Shape tool. It will display a list of predefined shapes, organized into Default Shapes, Arrows, Flow Chart, Jigsaw, and Specials categories. Click on the shape you need to use.

The chosen shape is now displayed in place of the rectangle icon and will be available until you choose another one...