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3. The Menus

Since the port of Scribus to Qt 3.x new menu options have been added which are context sensitive. Simply selecting an object and right clicking will bring up a context menu, which includes a great number of the menu options. The features below are based on the top level menus, but many of these choices are also available directly as a right click choice. When making adjustments within spin boxes, holding the shift key will make changes in the numerical value by tenths.

Here is the right click context menu for a text frame:

Modify Text Context Menu

3.1 File Menu

New

Closes any open File and brings up a dialog box in which you can set the dimensions of the new document. There are more than 25 options for pages sizes, including most DIN and US sizes.

Open

Closes any open file and brings up a file select box in which you can choose a document to be edited. Scribus can only edit one document at a time, but more than one instance of Scribus can be running, depending on your system's memory availability. The user preferences and settings chosen in the last instance are kept upon closing.

Close

Closes the current document.

Save

Saves the current document to disk.

Save as

Saves the document under a new name.New in 0.7.6, is the ability to save Scribus documents with gzip compression with the "Compress File" check box. The file extension is .scd.gz

Get Text/Picture

Changes to Get Text if a text box is selected and allows to you to import pure ASCII text. Alternatively, you can simply drag and drop a text file from the desktop or from Konqueror when running KDE

Changes to Get Picture if an image frame is selected. You can load .TIFF, PNG, JPEG, EPS or XPM images. For high quality printing for commercial reproduction, CMYK TIFF is highly recommended. Even if a preview is embedded in an EPS, Scribus will not display this.

When placing a EPS image, Scribus can handle transparency without problems, as well as recognizing DCS (Desktop Color Separations) comments for CMYK colors. Scribus will import the spot colors into the palette.

Save Text

Allows you to export the text of the selected text box to disk as pure ASCII text.

Save Page as EPS

Saves the current page as an EPS-File.

Save as PDF

Scribus has, as of the 0.6 and enhanced in during .0.7.x versions, a completely revised PDF export filter. These options are explained in a separate section PDF Export Options

Document Info

Here you can add additional information about the document. Entering data here on a given file will also be transferred into the PDF headers file when exporting PDF from Scribus. The info also can be read from file > open if preview is enabled in the dialog box.

Document Setup

Allows you to change the dimensions of the document. The maximum size of a document is now over 100 x 100 inches or 3000 centimeters. Scribus supports facing pages for cross page images or text. Note, to get the standard set of gutter layout for the two pages select two columns before clicking OK.

Print

Prints the document. You can optionally create a postscript file by selecting file as printer. As of version, 0.7.1, you can now use an external print command ex. XPP, lpr-cups or kprinter. This allows you to enable Scribus to use the gimp-printing module for the high quality ink jet prints from Scribus. Scribus will also remember the page setup from file to file when printing.

Quit

Terminates the program.

3.2 Edit Menu

Cut, Copy, Paste

These items work as usual. Users should be aware drag and drop is partly enabled by dragging with the right button, instead of the left. Once remembered, quite usable. To drag something from the scrapbook to the document, use the left mouse button. You can Left Drag:

Drag Pictures into a Picture-Frame.
Drag Text files into a Text box.
Drag Text from another Applications into a Text box.
Drag Items from Konquerer to Scribus.

With the right Mouse button you can:
Drag Items to another place in the Document (copying it).
Drag Items to the KDE-Desktop.
Drag Items to Konquerer.
Drag Items to another Application, where they appear as Text.

Clear

Clears a text box.

Select all

Crtl + A -(Default) Selects all text in a text box.

Colors

Brings up a dialog box where you can edit or create custom colors of the document. The append function is for copying a custom color from one document to the color palette. This will bring up a file open dialog from which can select the document which has the custom colors. Clicking OK will bring in the custom colors into the color palette. This is very useful for bringing in a custom CMYK color from a logo for example, where an exact match is required.

Font

Here you choose which font (s) will be embedded in the Postscript-output for printing. It is recommended to embed fonts when exporting PDF's for documents which you want to look exactly as laid out in the document. For further information about fonts and Scribus you can consult this article about optimizing your desktop for Scribus.

Preferences

The preferences panels have many choices and are covered in a separate page here: Preferences

Color Management

From this panel, you can enable color management globally or change the default profiles and rendering intents. The details are covered in Color Management for Scribus

3.3 Style Menu

This menu contains sub-menus for setting different object properties for text boxes, e.g. Color, Fonts Text alignment and so on.

3.4 Item Menu

Modify

Brings up a dialog box in which you can change most all properties of an object at once. This is also available as a right click context menu, shown below. Any object can be directly selected for editing by double clicking. Also new is the ability to have rounded corners on text and image frames.


Modify Text Context Menu

Right Click > Modify Text Frame can change orientation, make changes in the fonts, shading, colors and rotation of the text frame. This menu is also where you select and create PDF annotations and bookmarks. You can also convert frames from one object type to another e.g. text to picture.


Modify Image Context Menu

Right Click > Modify Image Frame can change shading, colors, borders, rotation and layering options on the canvas of the image frame.

Duplicate

Makes a copy of the currently selected item.

Multiple Duplicate

Allows you to copy an item more than once. This is handy for creating templates for business cards, labels or invitations where you would want to print multiple instances of a object on a single page.

Delete

Deletes the selected Item

Send to Back

Put the selected item in the background.

Bring to Front

Brings the selected item in the foreground

Lower

Shifts the selected Item one layer back.

Raise

Shifts the selected item one layer up.

Distribute/Align...

Opens a dialog box in which you can select how grouped items are aligned. This can allow you to automatically align objects like a text caption on a picture or create 3D layering/border/shadow effects with artwork or images. This option is only available after grouping objects.

Shape

Contains a sub menu with various frame styles. This only works on image frames.

Text On a Path

To create text on a path. Create a text box then enter the text. Then create a bezier curve with the desired shape. Next, Left Drag select the two items with the mouse. Group them together and the text will automatically follow the path of the curve. Double clicking the grouped item will enable editing the control points and shape of the bezier curve.

3.5 Page Menu

Insert

Brings up a dialog box where you can choose how many new pages you want to insert and where in the document.

Delete

Brings up a dialog box where you can choose which pages you want to delete. Note: there will be always one page remaining in the document.

Copy

This will copy a duplicate of a page to another section within the publication.

Move

Here you can move and reorder pages around in the document.

Apply Template

Here you can apply a previously created page template size, gutter and other settings. Templates are specific to a document. This useful if you need a series of pages for example with a background on all pages or default text boxes for page numbering, headers or footers.

3.6 View Menu

Fit in Window

Scales the document in a way that one page fits into the window. You can change the defaults in the preferences dialog box.

50%

Scales to half of the original size

75%

Scales to three quarter of the original size.

Actual Size

Scales to the original size.

200%

Scales to double size

Thumbnails

Scales to 20 % of the original Size

Hide Margins / Show Margins

Hides or shows the Page margins.

Hide Images / Show Images

Hides or shows Images in the Document. This can be useful for speeding up redraws with lots of images.

Show Guides / Hide Guides

Show or hides the guiding Lines

Snap to Guides

Makes the Guide-Lines magnetic.

3.7 Tools Menu

Hide Tools / Show Tools

Hides or shows the Toolbox. The tool bar can also be move by dragging to the left or right side of the screen and will be vertically oriented. In addition, you can enable show or hiding selected tools and palettes by hovering over a tool bar or a palette and right clicking and choosing from this menu below:

Showing or hiding Tool Selections

Hide Measurements / Show Measurements

Hides or shows the measurements palette. The measurements palette can also be "docked" by double clicking on the title bar.

Hide Colors / Show Colors

Hides or shows the Color-Palette. Note as of version 0.5 the color palette will have dynamic or static sliders for BRG and CMYK colors. The color tool can also be "docked" by double clicking on the title bar

Hides Outline / Show Outline

Hides or shows the Outline-Palette. This Palette can be very useful to select small Items or when you have a complex page with many items layered.

Hides Style / Show Styles

Shows or hide the paragraph styles included with the document. This is useful for formatting text with preferred font, size, color and justification. The styles palette can also be "docked" by double clicking on the title bar.

Hide / Show Scrapbook

The scrapbook is a very useful palette, which can store often reused components, like logos, repeated text blocks. The scrapbook is stored as a .scs file and should be copied with the working document if moved or backed up. You can have multiple scrapbooks, as well as one which is common to all documents. To copy something on the canvas, a text frame or picture, select and then right click drag to the scrapbook window.

Hide / Show Layers

Page Layers Dialog


This new capability in 0.7.4, shows an overview of the included layers in a document. This palette also adds the ability to raise, lower, add and subtract layers to a document. You can also choose with the check boxes which layers to print or to have visible while editing a document. Clearing the check boxes disables printing and/or viewing on-screen. After creating a layer, you can rename the layer by selecting and double clicking on the name box highlighted above. You can also select the layer you wish to edit by selecting from the tab next to the zoom tab on the status bar below:

Layer selection bar

Hide / Show Page Palette

This new feature can be used as the control center for handling applying templates, navigating pages, moving and inserting pages. The top half of the palette has the available templates for your document. The lower half has the actual pages within your document.

Page Palette in End to End Layout    Page Palette in Facing Pages Layout


You can do the following within the Page Palette:


Page Templates Layout


Above is an example of how to use a template which allows you to have recurring objects on several pages. The template page is has a background of black tinted at 5% to simulate glossy grey paper with a faded logo in the background. The eliminates the time to recreate this on each page.


3.8 Extras

Manage Pictures

Pictures - shows the link status of each image. If the picture is missing in the status box you can search and locate the correct image file. This also can be used to quickly replace pictures within a document.

Insert Special

This allows you to select extended ASCII and special characters into your document. Currently, Scribus can support ISO-8859-1(Latin 1), ISO-8859-2(Latin 2),ISO-8859-15(Latin 9) character sets, as well exporting them in PDF

3.9 Help

About Scribus

Displays version info about Scribus, the authors and translators.

About Qt

Displays the version information about the Qt libraries. Scribus currently needs to have a version greater than 3.0.3. You should check to make sure not only the run time libraries, but that also the Qt-devel is installed. If you are compiling Qt, you must have threading compiled in as an option or Scribus will not compile.

Tool-Tips

Allows you to switch Tool-Tips on or off. As KDE 3 and Qt3 have many new icons, enabling this will be helpful for many of the new features in Scribus since 0.7.0 was released. In 0.8 all tools have corresponding tool tips.


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