[Scribus] Tutorial-PDF online

[Peter Linnell]

On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 07:03, Jacek Kijewski wrote: 
> On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, [iso-8859-1] ma han wrote:

> heh. I've read this. Perhaps I cannot explain what is exactly the problem:
> when I have a text frame -> import text and I need some words to be in
> bold or italic, I can select those fragments and apply another font or
> size, ok. But linespacing is not changed, so the text look awfull.
> Especially when setting larger fonts.
> 
> I did not found any solution or workaround.

> Perhaps I am wrong. I am quite new to Scribus (I installed it few months
> ago, found it not usefull, and now I am back), so I am trying to
> understand some ideas and Scribus architecture.

What is difficult sometimes to figure out with DTP applications is they look,
 but do not quite work like a word processor. 

<snipped from the new quick start guide>


Once you have placed your text in the frame, formatting comes next. To
assist you with getting your text just so, Scribus has quite a number of
formatting options. 


Besides changing fonts, you can align the text left or right, justified
or ?block? and ?forced? Forced justification is way forcing
justification to both sides of a line, no matter how many words or
characters are in the line. Justification is a way of spacing letters
and words so the text is even on both sides, avoiding what is called
?ragged? text.


Screen Cap of Text Alignments


Line spacing is one area which trips up new users. If you start with
default of 12 points, line spacing will be 120% of the height of your
font or 14.4 points ( you can adjust these in the preferences.) Thus,
there will be 1.2 points above and below each the largest letter in a
font, as determined by Scribus by reading the font metrics. However,
unlike a word processor and like most DTP apps, the line spacing is not
automatically adjusted. If you wish to import text of a different size
or font, it is easier to select these options before importing. 


The easiest way to accomplish the above is by the use of paragraph
styles. With your document open Select > Edit Style > New 


Screen Cap of Edit Style 


Here you can define different paragraph styles which you can then apply
to imported text.Notice if you adjust the font point size, the line
spacing automatically adjusts to your preference. Then once you have
created your paragraph styles, you can apply them via the measurements
palette, by highlighting the text and clicking on the Style name in the
bottom of the palette. Double clicking a style name brings you back to
the Edit Style menu.

Scribus also uses the excellent hyphenation engine from Open Office. You
can enable automatic hyphenation or apply this via Extras > Hyphenate
Text. There are hints in the on-line docs for using this to give your
text a good visual display. Hyphenation is especially important to
consider when using narrow columns of text like you would find in a
newspaper or magazine. Properly justified and hyphenated text is easier
on the eye and make reading easier.

<end snip>

Unlike word processors, where you type or import text and then add
styles, with a DTP application it is often better to setup styles and
font sizes etc, *before* importing. This is comes from the idea that
text is brought into a DTP either <tagged> like Pagemaker or plain into
predefined templates, speeding up production speed.

Hope that helps you to understand how and why text handling can be
tricky with DTP applications.


Peter





























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