Top Ten Hints § Document Index § Edit Menu

3. The File Menus

Context Menus

Scribus uses many Right-Click context menus for object. 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 Crtl-Shift key will make changes in the numerical value by tenths. This is especially helpful when adjusting kerning and other measurements which need fine adjustment.

3.1 File Menu

New

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. The defaults are set in Preferences panel.

Remember, you can layout more than one "logical" page on each canvas. For example, if you need to print two pages, which face each other when printed, you can create a "readers spread", in the fashion below:

Creating a Readers Spread

In the example above, a US legal size page is set to 8.5" x14" (US Legal) landscape orientation and then divided into to two with guides. Then add guides - lock per the screen capture. If the content is needed to be actually two PDF pages, then create the half legals, laid as you wish > export PDF. Then group all items on the page and copy to a new doc with the legal/landscape mode as above.

In the picture above, I added vertical guides at the mid point, 1/2 inch each side of the middle guide and then guides which split the two pages. Then I locked them. Guides very helpful to visualize and align objects. Especially, one in the middle of the page, it makes it easy to center things like logos etc.

Open

Closes any open file and brings up a file select box in which you can choose a document to be edited. The icon to the right is the for the "home" directory for Scribus documents, which can be selected in the Preferences panel. The default extension is currently sla. The old extension is scd or scd.gz if compressed.

Close

Closes the current document.

Save

Saves the current document to disk.

Save as

Saves the document under a new name. Scribus can, optionally, save files gzip compression with the "Compress File" check box. The file extension is .sla.gz

Collect for Output

Saves the current file, with all linked pictures, EPS and text to another folder to ease moving a document to another machine. This can be used to save a Scribus document to a ZIP drive or another machine on the network.

Import..

Changes to Get Text if a text frame is selected on the canvas 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. Scribus can also handle MNG,PMN,PBM,PGM files as well. For high quality printing for commercial reproduction, TIFF or EPS is highly recommended. Even if a preview is embedded in an EPS, Scribus will 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.

Scribus can also import the first page of a PDF. The PDF is imported much like an EPS file.

Import.. Insert Page is always available. This allows you to import pages from other Scribus documents. First it will prompt you to choose a file, then a second dialog box will prompt you for the page to be imported. If you have custom colors or styles defined, they will be imported into the existnig document. If one of the two documents has layers, you may need to create a new layer in the target document, to prevent the new doc from having object obscure or affect the existing layout.

Save Text

Allows you to export the text of the selected text box to disk as pure ASCII text. You can choose the encoding of the text when exported. Scribus supports a number of encodings including most ISO 8859 and some Unicode encodings.

Save Page as EPS

Saves the current page as an EPS-File.

Save as PDF

Scribus has enhanced many PDF export filter functions. These options are explained in a two separate sections PDF Export Options and PDF/X-3 and Scribus which outlines the requirements for exporting ISO PDF/X-3 comforming PDF's

Save as SVG

Scribus can export individual pages as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files, which is an open W3C standard file format, based on XML. Scribus exported SVG files can imported to vector editors like Adobe Illustrator and further edited. SVG is an emerging format which has increasing support in browsers and is ideal scalable for drawings like maps and diagrams. Adobe has a special plug-in which enables display of SVG in a browser window. see: www.adobe.com/svg. Versions of Konqueror and Mozilla are in development which will enable them to display SVG natively, just like a jpeg or gif. See Scribus-SVG for more details.

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. Scribus has considerable printing flexibility. Even more when the optional CUPS - Gimp Print modules are instaled.

Basic Options:

Advanced Options:

Printing a separation file from Scribus

Quit

Terminates the program.


Top Ten Hints § Document Index § Edit Menu