[scribus] from raymond mcinnis

[Gregory Pittman]

On 04/29/2011 06:18 PM, Ray McInnis wrote:
> hello:
>
> a newbie to scribus, i am having some success, and some failures,
> basically blundering my way.
>
> (the mail should bring schaefer's manual today.)
>
> i work in both linux and windows, -- and this is one of my blunders, out
> which i was extracted by a friend -- and made the mistake of downloading
> scribus 1.4 (still in beta).
>
> i have three questions:
>
> 1) with scribus 1.3, how do you paste a whole odt file into a scribus
> file, and, page by page, have the the entire file distributed evenly?
>
Hi Ray. The first thing to say is that you have a lot of reading to do, 
and it's good that you've ordered the manual. Scribus, like most DTP 
programs, works in a frames environment. The page you see when you start 
a document is just a virtual space to work in. The actual content, 
whether it's text, images, some sort of graphic, is in a container 
called a frame. You make a text frame for text, image frame for an 
image. If you want an image in the midst of text, you will need an image 
frame superimposed on a text frame.
Because of this frames structure and all the variables such as font 
size, linespacing, and so on, a page of an ODT file may or may not 
correspond to a single page-sized text frame. One thing worth mentioning 
is that when you start a document, the dialog that pops up will let you 
create a number of pages, and also automatic text frames. If you create 
a number of pages, these frames will automatically be linked, so that if 
you load your ODT file into the first page's text frame it will 
automatically flow into the next page's frame, and if you need to add 
more pages later, these too will automatically have text frames and be 
linked to the previous page's text frame (if you have selected automatic 
frames at the beginning).
While you wait for your manual to arrive, check out the online manual 
inside of Scribus (F1 > Documentation), which has a less verbose and 
less complete collection that should help you get started. The section 
Scribus Basics should be particularly helpful. There is also the Scribus 
wiki, but I think this will likely be more helpful after you've gotten 
some basic sense of Scribus.

> 2) where do you find out the functions of the commands p30, p31, etc?
>
Not sure what you mean -- I'm not aware of such commands. Where are you 
seeing this?

> 3) where do you find recommended page formatting settings?
>
When you start Scribus or click to start a new document, you get a 
dialog with your default settings, which should be A4 paper, units in 
points, a single page, no automatic frames, and the default margins. You 
can change these settings each time you make a new document, but you can 
also reset the defaults to whatever you would like, under File > 
Preferences > Document, but of course there are numerous other settings 
you can change under Preferences.

Greg