[scribus] Coloured photo borders

[Gregory Pittman]

On 06/24/2010 05:47 AM, TSH wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:41:33 +0930, Ray wrote:
>
>> As a newbie to Scribus and Ubuntu, all I want to be able to do in a
>> quick&  simple manner is to place 2 or 3 photos, with coloured borders
>> and adjustable shadows onto a page, with a little text. So far I can put
>> the text&  photos onto a blank page and even rotate them a bit - but
>> making coloured borders&  shadows seems to escape me. Properties just
>> doesn't seem to cover this action.
>
>
> For simple coloured borders, select the object and open the properties
> dialog. Go to the 'Line' tab and select the type of line and size. Now go
> to the 'Colours' tab, click on the 'Line' button at the top (icon of a
> pencil drawing a line) and select your preferred colour.
>
> For the shadow, you need to cheat, and you can't do a soft shadow. But if
> you're happy with a hard edged shadow:
> 1) Copy the object and paste, so that you have a duplicate (it will sit
> directly over the original).
> 2) Now, with the new object still selected, right click and 'Convert to'
> a polygon.
> 3) In the properties dialog, under the 'Colours' tab, click on the 'Fill'
> button (icon of bucket) and select the colour for the shadow (do this for
> the Line also).
> 4) Now offset the shadow the desired amount, then right click and Level>
> Lower until it is under the original object.
> 5) If you want, you can select both the original object and the shadow
> object and go Item>  Group, so that they become a unit.
>
Don't forget that you can assign some transparency to your shadow to 
soften it a bit. I haven't played around with it, but I wonder if 
something might be done with gradients or maybe even patterns in the 
fill of the shadow object to give it a softer edge.

You can of course, make an image of a solid color with feathered edges 
in Gimp and then import that into an image frame in Scribus underneath 
your image. This might not be so bad if your images are of all one or 
just a few sizes.

Greg