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

Chapter 5. Formatting Your Text

Most of your document will need text somewhere. Importing the text is one thing but setting it nicely is another task altogether. Layout programs have a huge amount of properties that can be modified using a single click. Even if the layout process mainly deals with placing frames and managing pages, the designer who creates the page is the last stage of the production workflow before print. So he has to make the text as legible and as predictable as possible. Doing this usually takes a lot of time, and it appears to be one of the most important tasks of the layout design.

To begin in this chapter, we'll show Scribus text properties and then see how we can use them more efficiently with styles. At the end we'll try to make a book section in a few clicks by importing text.

In this chapter we shall:

  • See an overview of character and paragraph properties

  • Manage fonts

  • Use styles made in Scribus or imported from other documents