AN ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S STARTER GUIDE TO SCRIBUS
Guides for beginners need to be written by beginners. This document
filled a dark evening in a motorhome on the Devon coast after I had
produced my first newsletter. Scribus is free and not difficult to
learn at the beginner level. I found producing a document of mixed text
and pictures using Word could be difficult and this was much
easier.
Explanation. When I say click on an item in the menu bar like this
"window>layer" – layer is one of the options that will appear under
window on the menu bar below.
1. What’s a Desktop Publishing programme?
It’s a specialist programme for production of leaflets, booklets and
the like. Once you have got the hang of it it provides a convenient way
to layout a page with any mixture of text and pictures. Unlike in Word
where changes on one page may affect the next, each page is a seperate
entity The programme is very clever and will do all sorts of things
but if you only want something simple it is still a good choice.
2. The most basic features.
a. Frames
You are presented with a blank sheet (of paper eventually) of any size
you choose (and can print) with the margins shown.
On this you place empty “text frames” and “image frames”. You do this by clicking on “insert” and one of the frames and then clicking on the page and drawing out a box with the mouse. The image frame is the one with the cross
You can resize or move these boxes as with other programmes. That
is, click anywhere on it to select it. Now hover the mouse over it.
Somewhere you will pick up a vaguely flower shaped symbol - you can
click on it and drag the whole frame about. If you hover over the
peripheral squares you will pick up the expand or shrink symbol -two
arrows - click and drag.
A point to note is that you select a frame by clicking on it and then
you can drag it off the page and park it on the screen outside the page
for, say, future use. If you then save the page and reopen the
programme later it will still be there.
b. What you put in the frames.
Right click in a frame and you can choose “get text” or “get image” and
you can locate a text or image file and it will appear in the frame. It
probably won’t fit. You can change the size or shape of the frame to
suit, or you can change the contents.
c. Fitting text to your frame.
There are several ways to adjust text. You can right click and choose
edit which will give you Scribus’s own editor or you can change the
text file and “get” it again but when you do that you loose any changes
you made in Scribus’s editor. In the Scribus editor besides just
changing the text and such things as centring titles you can do all
sorts of clever things we might come to later. You can also right click
and choose properties. This where to change things for the whole frame
such as the font or font size.
d. Fitting images to your frame.
Right click and choose “adjust frame to image” which changes the frame
size or choose properties and “scale to frame size”
3 The concept of layers
Two reasons to use layers are to overlay text on an image and to avoid
the position where several frames are occupying much the same space and
you can’t select the one you want. All layers show at once, on top of
each other, unless you make one invisible. Text layers for instance
need to be higher in the “stack” than images. Click windows > layers
and you can create new layers, lock them, make them invisible or change
their position in the stack.
You might want a separate layers for images, text and boxes for instance. Once you have more than one layer you need to remember which one you are on when adding anything. There is a box near the bottom of the screen where you can change the “active” layer.
4. Lines and boxes
Now you know about layers we can mention lines and shapes, both on the
insert menu. These are easier to manage on a separate layer. Insert a
rectangular shape is an easy way to make a box. Having created it it
handles just like a frame but without it’s own content. Right click it
and change the opacity (under colour) from 100 to 0% and you can use it
to enclose a frame. Under properties there is also some scope for
changing the type of line and it’s width.
5. The properties box.
There are a lot of things you can change (for instance rotation) –
experiment. You do need to know that each property menu has several
pages often called for instance XYZ, shape and colour. On the XYZ page
you can change the title to something meaningful – this is worth doing
as it may help problem solving later.
6. Printing.
There are many fancy things you should be able to do but check. Your
printer may not be able do them. My cheap laser printer certainly
doesn’t.
7. File types.
Scribus has it’s own file type but if you want to send a file to
someone else export it to pdf. In theory pdf files when printed on any
computer always look the same.
