[scribus] Latex Text in different Colour ? Successful

John Culleton john at wexfordpress.com
Wed Jul 8 15:57:57 CEST 2009


On Wednesday 08 July 2009 09:30:25 am John Culleton wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 July 2009 04:50:11 am Julian Robbins wrote:
> > John Culleton wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 07 July 2009 11:47:20 am Julian Robbins wrote:
> > >> What I'm also trying to do is simply to render LaTeX text in
> > >> a different colour. You can set a few different fonts, and
> > >> font sizes, but I cant find any means to set a colour.
> > >>
> > >> Anyone ?
> > >
> > > Easy. You add a file named pdfcolor.tex thus:
> > > \input pdfcolor.tex
> > > In that file you will find about 70 CMYK colors defined. The
> > > colors are defined first, then user friendly names are
> > > defined for the colors, like
> > > \def\cmykPeach{0 0.50 0.70 0}
> > > followed by
> > > \def\Peach{\pdfsetcolor{\cmykPeach}}
> > > Why they chose a two step process I don't know.  But that is
> > > the mechanism.  You can copy the method in your own file to
> > > make your own colors.
> > >
> > > To actually use the color Peach you would use the command
> > > (gasp!) \Peach
> > > with brackets around the  colored text thus:
> > > {\Peach Isn't she a peach?}
> > > To be safe add \Black after the closing bracket.
> >

Just conducted an experiment in 1.3.5.
1. Drew a TeX frame.
2. Edited text in hte frame.
3. Deleted dummy entry.
4. Added the \input pdfcolor.tex statement.
5. Typed:
\Peach This is peach text.
6. Updated frame.
7. Saved file as pdf.
8. Displayed pdf file. Text was in peach color.

It takes longer to describe it than to do it. 

It may be that you are expecting the Scribus color system to affect 
the TeX created text. That is an unrealistic expectation. TeX is a 
separate process that creates a pdf or eps file (not sure which) 
and then Scribus imports that file.  It is a batch program being 
called by an interactive program.  To integrate the Scribus color 
system into the process would take a lot of work, and the procedure 
I describe above is very little work for the user.

The real benefit to the TeX function in Scribus will be to lay out 
text blocks using the superior TeX typesetting engine.  I haven't 
tested this on any long text but it might be a way to give Scribus 
top quality typesetting, second to none, with hanging punctuation,
paragraph instead of line typesetting,  etc. I may push the envelope 
today, just to see how far one can go. Can TeX frames be linked  
across pages like regular text frames?   That would be the change I 
would seek. 
 -- 
John Culleton
Create Book Covers with Scribus/e-book $5.95
http://www.booklocker.com/books/4055.html




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