[Scribus] Suggestion for Frames

[Gregory Pittman]

Louis Desjardins wrote:
> You're absolutely right, there is no room for confusion while using 
> the styles. When in the Style Manager, the user can apply a keyboard 
> shortcut to any style or leave it like that. If the user choose not 
> to apply any keyboard shortcut, the only way to access the style will 
> be through the Style Manager dialog (or palette) with mouse clicks. 
> One click, one style. When a keyboard shortcut is applied, then this 
> style can be applied with a keystroke. Whether the keystroke will 
> have an effect or not depends on the context. One shortcut, one style.
>
> Case:
> 1. You have set 3 Paragraph Styles for Main Title, Lead Paragraph and 
> Body Text, Main Title.
> 2. You have given these 3 styles keyboard shortcut 1, 2 and 3 on the keypad.
> 3. You have set 3 Frame Styles for Main Title, Lead Paragraph and Body Text :
> a) Large Frame that covers the width of the page, with a height of 3 
> cm within the margins, one column.
> b) Frame covering 2 column width plus the gap, for Lead Paragraph, 
> with a height of 6 cm, one column.
> c) Large frame covering the width and height of the page, within the 
> margins, set to 5 columns.
> 4. You give Frame Style a b c the following keyboard shortcut 4, 5 
> and 6 on the keybad.
>
> Now, when you're on a page with no object selected, if you hit keypad 
> 1 2 or 3, nothing will happen. If you hit keypad 4,5 or 6, a text 
> frame correspondind to your Frame Style will be created.
> In order for styles attributed to shortcut 1, 2 or 3 to work, you 
> need to first select a Text Frame.
>
>   
I think the "nothing happening" is consistent with other features of 
Scribus which depend on a frame being selected. One other question might 
be whether there should be an indicator on the toolbar that shows when 
the feature is active (frame selected), then greyed out when a frame is 
not selected.
> We could also set other Frame Styles for Images. Say for instance you 
> have a magazine with 3 columns. Pics can be 1-column wide, 2-column 
> or 3 column. For each, you can set a Frame Style with these 
> pre-defined coordinates. Attribute to these the shortcuts 7, 8 and 9. 
> You expect Scribus to create an image frame once you hit one of these 
> 3 shortcuts.
>
> To create a Frame using the Style manager follows the same rules that 
> you have to follow to draw any frame. You need to have a page in 
> front of you. A Frame can be created on the page, within another 
> frame or beside it. It doesn't matter.
>
> Same goes for Line Style or for any style. There cannot be any mix up 
> because the same keystroke cannot call two different styles. If you 
> need more keys, then you need to have a combination of Shift+Keypad 
> or CTRL+Keypad, etc. Of course a power user will prefer to set the 
> first keys available to the more repetitive tasks, leaving the other 
> for less used styles. Provided the context is favorable for the Style 
> to be applied, then the shortcut works. It's like hitting any key on 
> the keyboard: it works only if the working conditions are met.
>
> If we are to have Image Style, this could only apply to an existing 
> image within an Image Frame. If you hit the shortcut that is 
> connected to an Image Style when you are editing text, then nothing 
> will happen.
>
> In my office, we use those keypad shortcut everyday. In Quark, we are 
> limited to Text Styles (paragraph and character styles). The keyboard 
> is the fastest way to get things done (the mouse is really slow, we 
> all know that). I can only see that implementing this in Scribus will 
> definitely make it a very robust production tool. Expanding it to 
> many other styles (Line, Characters, Frames, etc.) will make Scribus 
> roar! :)
>
>   
One of the things that keeps me using Wordperfect is macros. There are 
many things in which it is convenient to assign a name to an arbitrary 
series of operations. I'm not sure if you still can, but you used to be 
able to assign a keyboard shortcut to a particular macro. This might be 
something else to weave into this frame styles concept.

Greg