You may place text into a text frame in the following ways:
If you really do want to insert a file somewhere in the middle, append, then select the text in Edit Contents mode, cut, then paste at the point you wish it to go, while in Edit Contents mode or in Story Editor.
Plain text into an empty frame will use the default font settings for your text frames, which you can change in File > Preferences > Tools.
The idea of putting some kind of text indicator, or tag, at intervals in a text file in order to trigger some action when the file is read is elegant and has survived since the early days of computing. The purpose in Scribus would be to automatically cause the application of some edit to the text, most commonly a paragraph style. These tags can be anything you want, but should be a combination of easy to type, easy to find visually as you scan the file, and unique. This is why the suggestions you see on the wiki and the printed manual use 2–3 letter combinations, beginning with a backslash (\).
On the textfile end of things you want to put these tags, let’s say \h1 and \h2, at the beginning of a paragraph which is to receive some style. Once you have saved the file, you then import it, initially no different than a plain text file, by using Get Text. You likely did not see it, but please now note the button labeled Automatic in the dialog. Clicking this shows a drop-down list, where you can find Text Filters as a choice. |
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On choosing Text Filters, and then selecting your file and pressing Ok, you now have a bit of work to do, since unless you have already created the specific actions based on your tags, you must do so now. For each tag you have a choice of Remove, Replace, or Apply as the action, and of course here we want to apply a style, but as you can imagine, we might also use this to remove or replace some text on import without altering the file itself.
In this small example, we have set up a filter that we have named thesis by choosing to Apply a paragraph style, named header1 for paragraphs starting with our tag, \h1, and we will remove match (the \h1). Had we previously set up thesis, it could be chosen from the drop-down button in the upper right corner of the dialog. Similarly, if we have already created these styles, they could be chosen from a list where you see header1 and header2. We could delete an action by clicking on the “–” button, and add another with the “+” button. |
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Right-click on a frame to show its Context Menu, seen to the right. We will not cover all the features of the text frame Context Menu, but here is the particular list of choices available for text frames.
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Any multipage document is likely to need to link text from one page to the next. An automatic way of setting this up is when a new document is created. This graphic is from the lower right corner of the New Document dialog. We have set the Options for 4 pages initially, with 2-column frames (which will fill to the margins), and an 11-point gap between columns. Show Document Settings After Creation will bring up the Document Settings dialog after OK is clicked.
You may freely edit the individual frames on pages afterward without losing your text linkage. Furthermore, if you add more pages to your document, they will also have these same linked frames. If you unlink somewhere in the middle, you will need to re-establish your linking pattern. |
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A selected but unlinked text frame will show the toolbar icon to the left (green arrow) active. Click the link icon, then click the next frame that your selected frame is to link to. If you have more frames you wish to link to, continue clicking on them in order. When your linking is finished, remember to click the link icon to deactivate it.
Unlinking is a similar process. The icon will only be active if you have selected a linked frame. Select the frame where you want the linking to stop, click the unlink icon, then click the next frame in the linkage. You will need to re-establish a linking pattern if you simply want to skip over a particular frame.
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Due to the addition of new capabilities in Scribus 1.4.x, and redesign of the Properties palette, the Text tab has become quite complex. The basic view seems simpler, but now we have a series of sub-tabs to choose from. At the top of the tab, there is a button for the font family, and then just below it the fontface in that family. Next we come to the spinbox for text size, and just below that a drop-down selector for linespacing, with 3 choices: Fixed, Automatic, and Align to Baseline Grid. Fixed linespacing allows you to set the space between lines of text using the spinbox to the right. Automatic spacing causes Scribus to adjust for you, according to the font size. The default setting for this is 120% of the font size, but this can be adjusted in File > Preferences > Typography. Finally, the row of buttons at the bottom sets justification – left, center, right, full, and forced full. At this point it should be mentioned that when you are in Select Item mode, any changes will apply to the entire frame contents. In Edit Contents mode, things are a bit more complex.
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The baseline grid is always present but hidden by default, and is never seen in printed output or in your PDF. Click View > Show Baseline Grid to see it. Its default setting is 14.40 points, and the default is adjustable in File > Preferences > Guides, where you will see that the Offset is also adjustable – this is the displacement of glyphs from the baseline, and can have a positive or negative value.
To the right we see text aligned to the baseline grid for the entire frame, along with an illustration of localized adjustments in Edit Contents mode. The Offset here is 0. As you can see, this is also a method for keeping linespacing constant when font size varies in a paragraph, since aligning to the baseline grid is just another kind of fixed linespacing. The other common use for aligning to baseline grid is to make sure that lines of text match their spacing in adjacent frames or columns. |
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Here we choose the colors for text. The fill color for a font is the main color. The line color only is active when outline or shadow effects are activated, and there is only one color applied to both effects.
From left to right, the effects buttons are as follows:
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To the left is a workaround for the apparent inability to reverse only an individual word using inline graphics. A small text frame was made with our word to be reversed, then converted to outlines. The group of outlines was then flipped, copied, then inserted inline (as in inline graphics) into our sample text. |
First line offset refers to how closely the first line of text approaches the top of the frame or the space it is allowed. In this example, where we have set a top distance, we see from left to right, Maximum Ascent, Font Ascent, and Line Spacing offsets. |
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Formerly, this was in the Shape tab, but now has sensibly moved to Text, since it does apply to text frames. Another enhancement is that now we can see in this example that two Columns, a Gap, and Top and Left distances have been set, even in an empty frame. This feature can be turned off/on with View > Show Text Frame Columns. |
Tabulators will also be covered in Working with Styles, but here we can create and apply frame-wide tab stops. Operationally this is quite easy. Simply click somewhere along the ruler, and a Left tab is created. Adjust Position manually or with the spinbox. If desired you can change the tab type to Right, Period, Comma, or Center. To delete an individual tab, click-drag it off the ruler.
The space between stops (Fill Char) will by default be white space (None), or can be Dot, Hyphen, Underscore or a Custom character of your choice. Tab Types
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When there is punctuation ending or beginning a line, the adjacent characters will be pushed in a bit resulting in a slightly ragged edge to the text. Application of optical margins allows the punctuation to extend from the frame just a bit so that the edges of other characters line up more closely.
In the image to the right, on the left side we see the edge with no optical margins applied, and the right side shows what we see with optical margins. |
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The upper part of this sub-tab contains some features long present in Scribus, but have simply moved here. Starting from the upper left spinbox and going clockwise, we have an adjustment to baseline, and not just for align to baseline grid, so that selected words can be shifted above or below the baseline for the desired effect.
Next we have kerning, in which the spaces between glyphs can be adjusted, again in a smaller than normal (negative percent) or larger fashion. In the lower right corner we can stretch or shrink glyphs vertically, and in the lower left shrink or stretch horizontally. |
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You might consider these a more advanced or intelligent kerning and character width adjustment, where we can, by setting the Minimum and Normal, or Minimum and Maximum parameters, allow for adjustments in spacing in a selective fashion, yet frame-wide. As you adjust these, you will see only some words, some lines adjusting. The idea is to adjust for more pleasing, even layout of the words in the frame, trying to avoid or eliminate problems like white space rivers.
See also: