[scribus] The Scribus Community Newsletter, November 2015

[Gregory Pittman]

On 11/09/2015 08:38 AM, ale rimoldi wrote:
> 
> Kicker
> ------
> 
> The _kicker_ is a typical design element used in newspapers: a row above
> the headline in a small font defining the thematic placement of the
> article, typically followed by a line of the same width as the article.
> In the screenshot you see a single-column example.
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, Scribus does not provide a specific function for drawing
> the line below the kicker. Of course you can just draw a line, but there
> is a workaround, that is faster.
> 
> Some experiments have lead to the following trick:
> 
> 1. First lay out the kicker itself and create a specific paragraph style
> for it.
> 2. Below the kicker, insert a new paragraph containing a single white
> space. Then create a new paragraph style: use a very small line spacing
> (3pt in my example), set the text alignment to "forced justified" and
> underline the text; with a long click on the "Underline" button you can
> define the thickness, the margin and the color for the underline. 
> Finally, apply the new style to to the "empty" paragraph. (_Important_:
> If you have text control characters enabled, you won't see the line;
> disable the rendering of the text control characters in "View > Show
> control characters" to the line.)
> 
> 
> The trick works by scaling a single underlined white space to the width
> of the text frame.
> 
> Thought this technique is outside the box, it works.
> 
> _This contribution was first published by Manutius in [the German
> Scribus forum](http://scribus-user.de/forum)._

As I look at this problem/solution, it occurs to me that a kicker is
really a specialized usage of an InfoBox, so it would seem that you
could modify InfoBox.py to do this job, even putting in a column-wide
line, by one means or another.

Greg