[scribus] a strange or not so strange use of Scribus

[Gregory Pittman]

I've been folding origami for something like 50 years, and one of the classic origami folds makes a 4-pointed flower. It turns out that the nature of this fold is that number of points of the starting paper shape determines how many petals there are in the result, and the folding technique is the same. I have found that a five-petaled flower looks much nicer than 4, but 6 is too many to my taste. 

So you need a regular pentagon to start with. Leafing through my origami books, I saw that what was advocated was to measure, so that each side of the pentagon would measure sqrt(5)-1, given a largest point-to-point measurement of the pentagon of 2. Commercial origami paper comes in various sizes, such as 6 or 4 inches square. 
One approach might be to write a short Python script to make the calculations, but then it occurred to me that Scribus offers another answer.

I started with a 6-inch square drawn with the Shapes tool. Next I created a pentagon using the Polygon tool. Now, switching to points as units, I could adjust the height/width and X-Pos, Y-Pos of the pentagon to exactly fit the width of the original square.

I copied the page, then adjusted the square to be 4 inches, and again adjusted the pentagon to fit this 4-inch width. After printing, I cut these out to make templates. 

Incidentally, one thing I have discovered is that gift wrapping paper (of the right thickness, i.e., not too thick) makes an excellent paper for origami, since it holds creases well, and of course, you can buy it in various colors and patterns, as well as reuse the paper from a gift you might have received.

Greg