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 - attach text to a line


If you're not really interested in drawing a line or prefer using a real vector drawing program like Inkscape instead of Scribus for this, you might also consider this tip that many people ask for: make a text follow a line. There are no tools for this in Scribus so don't look for it in the toolbar. Of course, it is still possible and here are some steps to follow:

  1. First of all draw a line (with the Insert Freehand Line tool, for example) or a shape.

  2. Then add a Text Frame, write your text inside, and set it nicely if you already know what you want.

  3. Select them both.

  4. Go to Item | Attach Text to Path.

What just happened?

You can see that the line is now hidden, but it is still there. If you then want to separate the text and the line, just go to Item | Detach Text from Path. By selecting the line and the text at the same time, Scribus understands what needs to be joined. Just take care of selecting only one line.

If you want to modify the text, double-clicking...