[scribus] Master pages not working as expected (Gregory Pittman)

[Gregory Pittman]

On 08/23/2018 03:51 AM, Mark Cornwell wrote:
>> You may have to submit a bug with an attached document, since I'm not sure
> what you're doing. One mistake people make is to put a frame in a Master
> Page, then try to add content in their document, but you cannot edit content
> except in Master Page mode, in which case all of the instances of that
> Master Page are changed.
>>
>> Something you can do is to make your frames in some sort of layout, in
> regular editing mode, then select them all (hold down Shift while you click
> them one by one), copy them (Ctrl+C), then paste (Ctrl+V) on some other
> page, in which case each frame will have the same coordinates as it had on
> the page you copied from.
>>
>> Greg
> 
> Greg, thanks, I carried on researching after sending the enquiry. You're
> right I was making that "mistake" - I had understood a master page to
> function like master pages in other tools: you can design one with graphics
> (e.g. logo to be on all pages) but when you design a "holding space" on the
> page you can then subsequently fill it in a "real" page. Master pages are
> templates in most products but it seems in Scribus they are little more than
> things that you can trace your actual design over. There's little point in
> doing that if one can't "snap to shape". The whole point of using a master
> is to ensure that things are positioned exactly each time.
> 
> The alternative of a scrapbook is also not ideal because you can't scrapbook
> a "whole page" as I understand it. If one could that might be a fair
> workaround.
> 
> Your suggestion for making (effectively) blank pages in the book and
> copy/pasting is sort of what I had anticipated Master Pages would be - but
> without the copy/paste.
> 
> It seems the design of Scribus in this regard is far from ideal.

As I've said many times on the list, there are many ways of doing things
in Scribus.

There are the Scripter commands, copyObject() and pasteObject():

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CopyObject()_and_pasteObject()

which, in your example, would require grouping the selected objects
before running such a script, then ungrouping after. Although I haven't
tried them, there are commands, groupObjects() and unGroupObject() that
could be incorporated into a script to do this automatically. (not sure
if the second command is unGroupObject() or unGroupObjects(), since the
manual is confused about this).

Another approach: Since you know about guides, these can be set up,
after which you can automatically size an object to the space between
guides -- for a text frame, for example, click the Text Frame icon on
the toolbar, then hold down Shift while clicking inside the space and
the frame automatically fills to the nearest guide or margin in all 4
directions.

Greg