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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning and inexpensive professional page layout to desktop computers with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Creating professional-looking documents using Scribus is not a cakewalk, especially with so many features at your disposal, it’s hard to know where to get started! Scribus Beginners guide walks users step by step through common projects, such as creating a brochure,newsletter, business cards and so on. It also includes guidelines on starting a web newsletter and online PDF (Adobe Acrobat format) newsletter along with basic scripting to extend Scribus as per your requirements. This book begins with the simplest tasks and brings you progressively to adapt your workflow to the most efficient tools. It commences with the description of the graphic tool chain and an overall chapter on how to draw a simple and attractive business card. You'll then see how to manage the pages of your document and organized their structure thanks to guides. Then being invited to fill them with text, you'll be able to import, set text style as well as use replacement and hyphenation tool. Pictures or vector drawing will be added to the documents too. You'll be taught to choose the best format at the best time, modify or distort the shapes to get very custom documents. You will also learn how Scribus handles advanced color features such as transparencies, overprinting, spot colors precisely and be sure they are set well for a print result without bad surprise. At the end, you'll know to produce a perfect PDF file, be it for print jobs or web with effects, buttons and javascript interactivity, extend the document capacities as well as Scribus tools with simple programming especially with the python language.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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Table of Contents
Scribus 1.3.5
Beginner's Guide
Scribus 1.3.5 Beginner's Guide
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: December 2010
Production Reference: 1021210
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849513-00-5
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Fillipo Sarti (<[email protected]> )
Credits
Author
Cedric Gemy
Reviewers
Robert Charles
Alessandro Rimoldi
Acquisition Editor
Dilip Venkatesh
Development Editor
Meeta Rajani
Technical Editor
Hithesh Uchil
Indexer
Tejal Daruwale
Editorial Team Leader
Aanchal Kumar
Project Team Leader
Priya Mukherji
Project Coordinator
Jovita Pinto
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Graphics
Nilesh R Mohite
Production Coordinator
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Cover Work
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
About the Author
Cedric Gemy is a French freelance graphic designer and training advisor who lives in Rennes but travels a lot to teach Scribus, GIMP, and Inkscape. He has been working with these software since around 2003.
Besides his freelance activities, he also teaches communication design in some French universities and private schools.
He is an active member of the Scribus and Inskcape team, involved in the user interface refactoring project of Scribus and in the documentation of Inkscape. He is a creator of the French Free Graphic Designer Association (AFGRAL) and FLOSSMANUALS Francophon.
This is his fifth book; he has already written two books about GIMP, one published under GPL licence, one about Inskcape, and one in French about Scribus.
He can be reached through his websites http://www.cgemy.com and http://www.creationlibre.org, where he provides information about free graphic software news and usage.
I would like to thank all the people who have supported me during the writing of this book, especially my wife, and the reviewers who made this book better than I could have made alone.
About the Reviewers
Robert Charles first dabbled in computer programming in 1984 when his family purchased a Radio Shack TRS-80 (AKA)- CoCo, Tandy Color Computer, and the Trash Eighty. Financial limitations kept Robert from pursuing a career in the technology fields until 1998, when he attempted to capitalize on the dot-com boom through web design.
After the dot-com crash, Robert joined the IT department of a financial company and was introduced to the Open Source community through a work colleague.
Robert started his own company in 2006, employing and touting many open source solutions, such as OpenOffice, GIMP, Scribus, SME, and Paint.Net in his business and personal use.
Alessandro Rimoldi lives in Zurich, where he promotes free software, especially through the workshops created for the Grafiklabor. He has been part of the Scribus community since it began, and since 2009, he has been an active member in the board of the Libre Graphics Meeting.
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Preface
Scribus is a relatively new software that is becoming famous thanks to the nice features it provides and the good printed results that it creates. As a layout program, it helps in creating business cards, brochures, newsletters, magazines, catalogs, and many other documents that need to be exported in high-level PDF, be it for high resolution printing or web interactive purposes. Scribus is free and is an open source application that provides all the features that one might need to create appealing designs productively. It is so easy to use that it can be used by beginners as well as more advanced users.
In this book, we will explain the most important features, those that you will really need, and many others, with the purpose of giving you the best of the software. As Scribus is intended to make printed documents, we will explain, when necessary, some specifics of the print workflow with the purpose of helping you to understand why the software is made like this.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Scribus, will show the place that Scribus can have in a graphic workflow, what type of documents it can create, and how a layout program is different from other kinds of software. Then we will look at the main Scribus window to help identify the main tasks that will be done.
Chapter 2, Creating a First Layout, is a huge step-by-step tutorial to introduce you to the main Scribus functionalities and logic. We will create a simple business card using simple shapes, a vector logo, and of course some text.
Chapter 3, Mastering Pages, is where we deal with one of the most important concept of a layout program, namely, the page. As laying out mainly consists of placing objects and content on a page as nicely as possible and arranging those pages more consistently, we will see how to create or delete a page and how to get help to make it as structured as it needs to be and easily understandable to the reader.
Chapter 4, Using Text in Scribus, will of course be very important for many kinds of documents and will mainly contain text that can be written within Scribus or that can be imported. In this chapter, too, we will see how to look for text, make replacements, and link frames to help you work with long documents.
Chapter 5, Formatting Your Text, will show you the Scribus options to give it the aspect you like, as text needs to be set nicely and can sometimes be very long, and use a paragraph or the character style to use those properties as efficiently as possible. Beyond this chapter, we will talk about methodology as well as typographic preciseness.
Chapter 6, Special Frames for Complex Content Management, will mainly explain how to create tables in Scribus. They can be empty or can be imported from another application like OpenOffice.org Calc. After that, we will have few tests with render frames, which is a nice and very original way of including the result of any other applications in Scribus dynamically.
Chapter 7, Drawing Advanced Frames and Shapes, will show what possibilities Scribus has in the customization of the standard rectangular frame. You will then convert frame types, use several kinds of shapes, and mix or distort them with some advanced Bezier drawing and modification tools.
Chapter 8, Importing Images, is one of the more complex and theoretical chapters because even if pictures are used to make nicer and lighter documents, it's something else to have them printed well. Here, file formats and their specifics will be at the center, and resolutions, clipping path, or layers that they contain will be used to set the page according to the graphical and readability needs.
Chapter 9, Applying and Managing Color, will, in some ways, follows the previous chapter. It shows how Scribus can use flat colors as well as gradients or patterns, with or without transparency. More importantly, we will see how to create a custom swatch to work more efficiently with them, as well as creating spot colors, which are very specific in the print process. Color management will be part of this to help us get the most accurate results.
Chapter 10, Print Your Layout, is mainly dealing with PDF options to help produce the best document before sending it to a print-shop as a print-ready file. We will see that Scribus provides a verifier to help you evaluate your layout, which can have some kind of PDF format. A basic knowledge of the PDF versions will be necessary and we will see them as well as the very nice and complete Print Preview window and print options.
Chapter 11, Customizing the Creation or Viewing Process, will be a different chapter in which we will see form and interaction options of Scribus and how to make simple calculations into the file or modify the rendering on the reader's screen. Finally, it will be time to see how to extend Scribus with Python script to add some new custom functionality or perform a repetitive action.
What you need for this book
To read this book, you just need to be comfortable with using your computer. You need to understand how the directories can be organized and used. Except for that, just manipulating the mouse, being patient, and being creative will be the most desirable qualities you'll need. Of course, having some knowledge in other software can be helpful, especially on photo retouching, for example with GIMP, vector drawing like Inkscape, or Office suite. This book doesn't explain all this. However, any document you'll import into Scribus will need to be prepared beforehand and will have to be well managed from the beginning to the end.
Who this book is for
This book will help you if you have never used Scribus and if you are interested in creating documents that need to be printed by a print professional. This book will be for every person who works as a graphic designer or those who play a similar role in a company. It can sometimes offer you advice on how to create a layout, but this is not the main subject. And if you already know another layout program, it will help you understand how to migrate to this new and promising software.
Conventions
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Time for action - heading
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
What just happened?
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
Pop quiz - heading
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
Have a go hero - heading
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "In any case, you'll need to import Scribus module for your Python script to access the Scribus-specific functions using import scribus."
A block of code is set as follows:
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "In the Action tab of the Field Properties window, choose the Submit Form type".
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Chapter 1. Getting Started with Scribus
If you are reading this book, you have surely decided to use a new software called Scribus. I would like to congratulate you on your choice. However, what I find more interesting is to understand why you opted to use Scribus.
You might be fully interested in free software, may be running Linux or any other system except Apple Mac OS or Microsoft Windows, and in this case, you don't have much choice except for Scribus, Scribus, or Scribus. This is mostly because proprietary equivalent software such as Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress is not available for Linux-based platforms.
If you are not interested in "free" software, the first piece of advice I would give you would be to take a look at its principles. Scribus is licensed as General Public License and a lot of software that you use everyday is certainly based on such a license. But again, why Scribus? Is it because you don't need to spend a penny for what InDesign is worth based on a human month of work? Is it because you were looking for software that would let you explore your creativity? Or is it just because you've heard of it as a good application?
The answer to all of these, and many other questions, will give good reasons. In fact, to be honest, Scribus is not as complete as InDesign or Xpress. The latter is nearly twenty years old and mature, and the first is made by the most important company in the printing world that is at the center of each step of the printing process. However, Scribus will provide you with all you need to be productive at creating nice documents (which will print perfectly) and some things that you may find in other software too.
What Scribus mainly does is to simply:
That's the point. As I travel a lot to teach Scribus, I'm always surprised at how many people show me documents that were already created using Scribus, and that I didn't even think could be. When I began using Scribus six years ago, at the very beginning, it was hard to imagine that it would become so popular. At that time Inkscape appeared too, and they have both completely changed the free software world—even if not the graphic world yet.
Laying out with Scribus will mean that you will create brochures, catalogs, business cards, books, magazines, or newsletters—in a way any kind of document with which one can communicate. A layout design job generally takes information from different sources, and places them on a page in a way that will improve readability as well as be a pleasure to look at—sometimes it also improves efficiency. Laying out is the process of arranging elements with respect to some rules on various types of content that can be single or multi column, with or without pictures, and printed in black, color, or varnished. Well, a layout is a creation that helps the reader read by adapting itself to the content. This is particularly true in magazines where the layout changes very often in a single issue—and always gives the best printed result to the reader, of course. To be honest, how easy would it be to create an exact copy of your favorite magazine in a text processor? Just have a try, and you'll see that they will certainly not be optimal for the task.
Desktop publishing software versus text processors
If you have already used layout software before, these arguments are not new to you. However, if you come from any other computer-assisted profession, you may be surprised at the way such software is organized. Especially, most of you would have certainly used text processors such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, and maybe Microsoft Publisher. Once you go deeper into the details, you'll see how Scribus is different.
I've heard many people explain that they were trying Scribus, because they thought or heard it was a better piece of software. I would suggest not to begin reading this book with this idea in mind. Text processors are very qualitative when it's time to handle text (and this is an important point) but not when there is a need to customize a document. Just take a look around: you can identify any magazine or any book collection because of their visual identity, which is made possible by the Desktop Publishing set of software. Could you identify as easily the origin of a Microsoft Word or OpenOffice document? I'm not sure, because all of these documents will be very similar.
Generally, you won't use a layout program if you need to save time and work very quickly, because it is not intended to save time, but to let you be as free as possible to create a unique document: the one that will make you change the world, or the one that will help you improve the communication of your company and make it more efficient. Scribus will give you everything to be as productive as possible. However, every time you need to choose a color, every time you need to add a shape, or every time you need to change the text settings, every single little task that you will find yourself doing to get the best graphically designed final document will add to the time taken. This is a very important point if you want your layout project to succeed. I have experienced many projects where people really underestimated the time taken to perform these tasks.
To help you create your document, remember that a layout program is not based on text handling, but on the page. In Scribus, the page is an object that you'll be able to manipulate. On the page, you'll add shapes or frames that you'll place precisely, one by one, and each of these will have their own properties. Especially in a layout program, images are drastically apart from the text, whereas in a text processor both will be in the same flow. This again results in a different way of considering the elements you will have and may change the way you work. This is for the best, and once you get used to this, once you have the major but quite simple software possibilities integrated, and once you have the print process specificities in your work, you'll be more free than you've ever been to create a unique document. This document will be the result of your own creativity and not only the default settings defined by a product or another.
The graphic workflow
I would advise you to keep your text processor open. You should use it as often with or without Scribus. A layout program is not made for text processing, so use a software that is. Scribus will be the software you'll use to mix the different documents (texts, photos, and drawings) that you will want to use. However, each of these elements will be created or modified with a particular, and dedicated, application because it is aimed to be used in a particular environment: print companies. So, when you use Scribus, you will mainly use four pieces of software:
A lot of other software can be included in the list, but this is the basis. Of course, you can manage all of these tasks within a single Writer document, but this is not the way a layout program works. Moreover, it is not the result that you have on your screen that is important, but the result that you'll get in print when the document is passed through many hands and computers.
This is not the way a layout program works because photos are the job of photographers, drawing is the job of an artist, and writing is the job of either a journalist or an author. Each of these people wouldn't really need to know what the other does and how. Of course, nowadays, one single person is often enough to do all this: not due to a real wish to improve quality but due to more of a human resource necessity. Anyway, it makes it a more interesting and less boring job, but in the same time, it requires much more knowledge.
As a first step, you should work in WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) mode. It might be surprising if I told you that Scribus was a graphic software. But most layouts are made to enhance the readability, by graphical means. So it seems very important to know as soon as possible how the text will be structured (how many titles and sub-title types, large paragraphs or not), how often pictures will be needed, and of course who the document is made for. A book or a magazine about Elvis Presley will certainly not be similar to one dealing with peanuts of the Babuyan Isles (if these peanuts really do exist, please send me some!).
The second step is to analyze the visual code that your reader will be used to, and to decide how you will behave with them. What will you follow or not follow? Look at the aspects where you can incorporate your own creativity without being considered out of context. This will guide you to some criteria such as color, fonts and font properties, and some page layout structures.
Next, it is time to know what you are allowed to do, taking into consideration economical (ask your client or boss) and technical (ask your print company) needs. Will you be printing in black only, with two colors, or with four or more? What kind of paper, paper size, and printing type (digital, offset, and so on) will you need? All these things will help you to define the basis of your work. You can, however, consider these as constraints, or as a wonderful challenge to deal with. I like the second option. There will be enough possibilities to express your genius. The standard use of software in a layout workflow is shown in the following diagram:
Then it's time to sketch. Begin with papers and color pencils. Work at 100% scale. So if you use a special paper size, get it cut if needed. Once you've found something nice, plug your computer in and launch Inkscape, which will be a more practical, reactive tool to go deeper into the details. You'll then get a mockup, which you'll alternatively be able to use directly in Scribus after an import, or will have to redraw depending on the way you'll want it done. In this mockup, try to simulate as precisely as possible what a standard page will look like: add sample text, sample images, and so on. Show it to important or confident people and listen to them. If they say without an argument that it is really good and that you're stupefying, kick them and tell them that you'll ask them the day after or to come back after they find something else to say (Ah! yes, if they kicked you back, maybe you can stop right there and go to the next person you've thought of).
The next step will be to work on the real content. Once Scribus has everything such as custom swatches, master pages, and styles set, there's nothing else left to do other than filling the pages. If you have only one display, buy two new ones, or deal with virtual displays (Linux has had it since prehistoric times, so it might be cheaper than a big 24'' screen). Launch GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus. Here, some will work with these three pieces of software at once and improve each single picture before importing and some will, alternatively, prefer to improve all the pictures first and then import them. Find your way, and find good collaborators who work in the same way (the most difficult task).
Do regular proof reading. Use all of your friends for that: a graphic designer must have many friends if he wants to be a must see. Use PDFs for this. There are many tools that can annotate PDFs; for example, Whyteboard is an easy and lightweight software that can be run on Linux, Windows, or Mac. Once everything is perfect, create your best PDF using Scribus and use its Preflight Verifier. Using Adobe Acrobat Pro is also nice to check the quality of your PDF and detect any errors that you could have made. Unfortunately, there is actually no equivalent in the free world. Finally, your PDF is ready to be sent to your print company, which will lead to the end of the process, unless there is a problem.
In this book we will help you in improving one part of this simplified workflow. But it is a major part. You can have the best idea, but if it is badly implemented in the software, or you don't take the print process into account, it won't work well at the end. Scribus is not the fastest software one can imagine, and not the most stable too. However, it is extremely powerful and will give you the result that matches exactly what you have set. So you can trust it as much as one of your old friends.
It's time to understand how to talk to it.
Understanding the workspace
Once you've launched Scribus, you'll be prompted to create a new document or open a previous one. We'll go deeply into the secrets of this dialog in the beginning of Chapter 2. For now, just go through by validating so that we can see the basics of this software.
Note
This book has been written using a development 1.3.5+ version of Scribus, taking care that the menus and windows will be kept similar in a future stable release. Scribus follows a slow release scheme and there has not been a new stable release for a long time. If you're not used to free software development, stable means that the software is considered to have been tested, that most of the important bugs have been corrected, and that it shouldn't crash. Whereas, development means the developers are still working deeply on improvements and might at the same time cause errors.
By using such a version, we hope to give you the best of the new professional Scribus functions. On a Debian-like distribution, installing Scribus-ng will be better than the standard Scribus version to follow this book. If you have any other OS, download Scribus from here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files
or
http://www.scribus.net/?q=downloads
The official Scribus download site is the best place to go to get a package to install. However, when you'll have this book in hand, there might be some new 1.4 stable version available that should look the same and be better to use than any development version.
The layout of Scribus, as shown in the following screenshot, is similar to other software that you might know:
The topmost is a title bar that contains the name of the active document. If the name has no extension, it is because you never did save the document, and it might be time to do so. If there's a star after the document name, it's because the document has changed since the last time you saved it and that it might be the time to save too. Scribus can automatically save your document: we'll describe how in the Customizing Scribus a bit section of this chapter.
The menu bar gives you the ability to access most of the Scribus functionalities. Some menus are well known, such as the File menu in which you'll find the entries to create a new document or to save the actual document, but other menus such as Page, or Item may relate to specific Scribus tasks. Remember that while working on a document, Scribus will show a context menu on right-clicking. This menu will often be different and related to the object that is selected when you right-click. Contextual menus are most of the time a good reminder when you don't exactly remember where to find something related to an object type. In this document we will give the context menu entry whenever it's possible, as well as shortcuts when available.
Under the menu bar, you'll get, by default, another bar filled with many icons. These icons are the quick access to some menu entries. The ones on the left-hand side are related to File or Edit entries. Those at the center are Insert tools or transformation tools. On the right, PDF options are displayed. Once you get used to Scribus, none of these will be necessary because they can nearly all be accessed using keyboard shortcuts. We describe some of these tools in the next pages, and, of course, these make up the major part of the content of this book.
The main area not only contains the page at the center but a workspace too. If there are many ways to manipulate a document in Scribus, there are no other ways of displaying pages. Especially if you use a Text processor, you're certainly used to some custom display. OpenOffice.org Writer has a Web display that shows the text as a single flow, without displaying the page border and margins. In a layout program where most part of the job is to place an object precisely on page, this would be a nonsensical feature. However, this is interesting because the so-called workspace, which is the area placed outside the page, can be used to manipulate an object before inserting it or an object that you've made but not sure you'll use. In this way, you don't need to delete them, and you keep them available. It's evident that the workspace should not itself become a shambles, and should be cleaned—especially, once you're happy with your page. Some final PDF process can give errors if there are objects outside pages. Under this main area, we have some information that will help in many cases, as shown in the following screenshot:
From left to right:
This is a good amount of buttons and lists, but since they are quickly available with the help of the mouse, they provide very handy ways to manipulate the document and give you a lot of comfort. It's a good thing to get used to them as soon as possible.
Time for action - using the main status bar options
To help you get used to the status bar options, let's do a simple and common task such as inserting a photo in a shape and see how the User Interface can help us easily get the result.
What just happened?
We have inserted a shape and have converted it to a frame in which we could place a picture. Then the context menu and status bar have helped us to choose the place or aspect of what is on the page and the way it is displayed. Remember that what you have on screen is just a preview that doesn't always exactly match what will be printed because many objects that won't print are set in the page to help you, and other objects that you add might change with some display or print options. Knowing these options will be key to the success of the layout process.
The toolbar
The toolbar is one of the most important places of the Scribus graphical user interface. Anything you can add to your page can be found here. So it's easy to say that every single button has to get your respect. Tools are every function that you'll use to act directly with your mouse on an object. Tools help you create and manipulate just like in the real world when you use your hands, pen, scissors, and so on. In the previous exercise we used the shape tool.
The Scribus toolbar doesn't include only tools, but some common functionality shortcuts too, especially the traditional Save or Undo button. So it is divided into several parts. Let's have a quick look at these buttons.
You can grab each part of this toolbar and dock it to another side of the workspace, usually the left one, vertically. To do this, place the mouse over the drag area at the beginning of each toolset and then press the left mouse button and drag. When you reach a side, you'll see the rulers move to make the nearest placeholder available.
Tip
Menus, buttons, or shortcuts
Most of these tools can be used from the Insert menu too. But you'll certainly adopt the fastest way: using the toolbar or the shortcuts.
Properties Palette: The main place
It won't be enough to add frames, write text, or add pictures. You'll certainly have to set their aspect, such as changing colors, fonts, and many other things. Since a layout has to be an attractive and nicely designed document, we need to have quick access to the properties that let you customize those objects.
The Scribus team has decided to put all these options in one single window: the Properties Palette, often called PP (we'll call it this in this book). The Properties Palette can be opened or closed with the Windows | Properties menu or the F2 key. There are so many options in the Properties Palette that it has been divided into several parts. The following are the most important ones:
Tip
And the groups!
The Group tab is new and not yet stabilized. It has mainly the same options as the Shape tab but can be applied only on grouped objects.
The most complex and important of these tabs is certainly the Text tab. It includes several expanders that give access to more or sometimes less advanced settings. Less because you'll get many common options such as the font size or color of the text. But you'll see optical margins, and kerning or baseline adjustments, which are very often used in layout programs and more rarely used in text processors. Of course, we'll go through these options in a later chapter.
When considering the Image tab with the extra advanced settings and the effects windows, it can also be important to spend some time on them. Image management is an entire part of this book too. But don't be trustful to pictures. Except in some specialized fashion or travel magazines, where very good photographers are involved, pictures are usually used to illustrate and are not the most important feature. So they might not be the basis of the layout either. However, every time you'll use a picture you'll have to pass through several steps in a photo retouching program and manage as finely as possible the relation with your layout if you want to get the best results. This part of the Properties Palette can help you but cannot do everything:
The Nodes window available from the Edit button of the Shape tab or by double-clicking a shape, could be considered as another important part. However, it is less commonly used simply because in a layout, shape and frames are mostly rectangles. It seems then that it is more important to spend time on text and picture settings than on shapes (except for some special actions, especially a nice one: making text flow around a picture).
Layout and story editor
In Scribus there are two ways to help you work. Of course, the layout mode is considered more natural for such software. It is activated by default—the one in which you enter automatically when you launch the software. But the layout mode is not always the easiest to work with, especially when you have a large quantity of text placed in many frames, on tens or hundreds of pages.
