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 - creating custom paths with the Bezier tool


It's time to have a try. Our purpose is to draw some kind of "B" letter. We will need straight lines on the left-hand part and curves on the right-hand part. We will then import a picture inside, and use these frames with a text flowing around.

  1. In a new blank page, activate the Insert Bezier Curve tool by pressing B.

  2. Click where you want in the page, let's say left of the middle so that you have enough space to go on.

  3. Move the mouse above this node to make the vertical line of the B, click again, and go to the left to begin the first curve.

  4. Place your mouse right to the middle of the first segment and press the mouse button. Drag towards the top right at an angle of around 45 degrees and you'll see two dotted lines. The straight one shows the control line (the mouse position gives the position of a control point) and a curved one, which is the actual curve state.

  5. Drag until you find the perfect curve and release.

  6. Then at the half of...