For one thing, the status bar takes the place of a View menu.
Click an object, and you will generally find a context menu with a list of options for what you can do.Īs soon as you start looking, though, the differences become obvious. Superficially, Scribus' editing window resembles that of the average word processor, with menus and taskbars on the top, a status bar on the bottom, and horizontal and vertical rulers bracketing the document. For now, though, you can click the OK button to enter Scribus. Should you want to change these options, you will find them - along with others - under File -> Document Setup. If you do not use these options, then you will have to add text frames manually as needed. You can also create multiple columns on this page. In other words, it make Scribus act more like a word processor. Selecting this option automatically adds a text frame to all of the page within the margins. The other option on the right is Automatic Text Frames.
Admittedly, though, working in points can be annoying, since one point is one-seventy-second of an inch. The default points is usually the most useful, especially if you are going to adjust the spacing between lines, since fonts are measured in points. The right hand panes list options for the number of pages and the document's basic unit of measurement. You might want to use the Printer Margins feature first, then adjust the margins, just to ensure that you do not create margins that are too narrow for the printer.
However, because Scribus is designed for print, you also have the option of clicking the Printer Margins button and automatically setting the margins to the minimum margins that a particular printer supports. In the middle of the window are panes for paper size and margins with which you are probably familiar from word processors. For all of these choices except Single Page, you also need to specify whether the first page of the document is a Left, Middle, or Right Page usually, it will be a right page (look at the first page of a book, and this observation becomes obvious. For books, you probably want Double Sided, and for pamphlets and brochures 3-Fold or 4-Fold. For most documents, you can use Single Page, which refers, not to the number of pages in the document, but the unit of page design. In the left pane of the New Document tab, you can choose the template for the document. The last two tabs are self-explanatory, but New Document needs some explanation. How its logic affects the editing window should become obvious as we look at Scribus' general design and workflow.īy default, Scribus opens in a dialog window with three tabs: New Document, Open Existing Document, and Open Recent. Scribus is very efficient about helping you achieve this goal, but it does mean that the editing window is not quite what most people are used to seeing. It is not so much a creator of new content as a manipulator of existing content, and its editing window and tools are all designed to make that manipulation as easy as possible. You might say that Scribus treats each page and document as a container in which you place and edit objects. With this orientation, it is perhaps closer to The GIMP or Inkscape, which can be disorienting to the general user. Unlike a word processor, it is not intended primarily as a way to input text - although you can use it for that - but as a layout program for manipulating groups of objects for the printed page. Designed for desktop publishing, Scribus is a specialty application, and not intended for general use the way that or LibreOffice is.
To some extent, this reputation is justified.
Scribus tabs series#
On the other other hand, Scribus has a reputation of being diabolically difficult to learn - and it's this reputation that I'm hoping to help change in my next series of articles on, starting with this general introduction. On the one hand, users are vaguely aware of Scribus as a first-rate application that can hold its own against proprietary counterparts like InDesign.
Scribus tabs software#
Scribus has mixed reputation among free software users.
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