Scribus organizes paragraph styles as a super-set of character styles. However, as with character styles, you can also apply a paragraph style from the Text tab in the Properties window. The best place to apply paragraph styles is from the Story Editor, where you can see which style - if any - is used by each paragraph. Scribus loads only a limited set of colors by default, so you might want to select Edit -> Colors to add what you need for a company's colors or for colors that you are continually using. There, you can select the color for the text. In addition, you can offset charcters from the baseline - an effect best used in a small set of characters - and set the language for the characters.Īt the bottom of the window is the Colors pane. These options give you the chance to improve the appearance of an especially small or large block of text, since one of the problems with digital fonts is that, they often have the same proportions, even when you venture outside the range of 10-14 points in size. In the Advanced Formatting pane, you can alter the font even more from its defaults, altering the vertical or horizontal spacing of characters. However, these two features can be useful if you are trying to improve the look of fully justified paragraphs, especially in narrow columns. In Basic Formatting, you can also edit the tracking (the spacing between characters) and the default width for a space, although you should be careful about using these options, since you can easily create a mess - although, since you are using styles, you can clean up quickly. In the Basic Formatting pane, you select the font, style, and size, and any effects, which range from underlining and subscripts to outline and shadow.
The Styles Manager divides character styles into three panes of options. Confusingly, the name of what you are editing does not change in the X,Y,Z tab it is still the name of the text frame. You can implement a character style by selecting characters in a text frame, and opening the Text tab in the properties window. More demanding users may also want to select an edge (how lines meet) and an ending (how lines end) for complex objects. The most common line formatting options are the type of line - for instance, solid or dotted - and the line width and color. Line styles can be applied via the Properties window to any shape, polygon, line, bezier curve, or freehand line that you add to a document from the Insert menu.Ĭompared to paragraph and character styles, line styles have a limited set of options. However, if you want to use character styles, you have little choice.Īt any rate, once you understand this inconsistency, you can focus on the more important job of learning how the choices available for each type of style. Editing and formatting text in a text frame is so awkward that generally I recommend that users avoid doing so. To say the least, this inconsistency is annoying. To apply character styles, you need to select the characters to format within a text frame in the main windows, and open the Properties window to select a style from the Text pane. Not only that, but formatting done on individual characters rather than whole paragraphs - whether manually or via styles - doesn't display in the Story Editor, either. In fact, the Story Editor still doesn't, although it has a pane for paragraph styles. Not too long ago, Scribus did not support character styles. Which brings up another peculiarity: the relationship between paragraph and character styles.
For paragraph styles, you also have the option of selecting Edit Text from the right-click menu of a selected text frame, or selecting Ctrl+T to open the Story Editor. However, to apply styles, you either select Properties from the right-click menu of a selected object or press the F2 key. To define and manage styles, you open the Style Manager, by selecting Edit -> Styles or pressing the F3 key. One of the conceptual problems you may have is that styles are defined and applied in different places in the editing window. However, styles are implemented idiosyncratically in Scribus, so they can take time to learn, even if you are familiar with the basic concept from other applications.
As in any other self-respecting word processor or layout application, these styles allow you to apply detailed sets of formatting options quickly, without having to change each instance of a formatting option individually. If you don't include master pages (which are really styles under another name), then Scribus supports three types of hierarchial styles: lines, character, and paragraph.
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