2007/6/30, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net>: > > I'm just starting with Scribus, version 1.3.3.8 on Ubuntu Feisty amd64. > > For my first serious project I am doing a book cover. I need to place a > text frame, rotated, in the spine area. The page width is 12 inches and > the spine will be 1/2 inch, so I set guides at 5.75 inches and 6.25 > inches. I created a frame, typed the title into the frame, then rotated > it 270 degrees. I dragged it in between the guides, then used the mouse > to drag the width (originally height) of the frame so it is now 1/2 > inch, fitting neatly between the guides. > > So far, so good. But I need the text centered vertically in the frame. > I could kludge it by setting the inside margins for the frame, > experimenting until I got it close enough. But it sure would be a lot > faster, simpler, and more accurate if I could just set the properties > for the frame to "vertically centered text." I poked all over Scribus > and I looked through the wiki, but I can't find this feature. Does it > exist? If so, where'd y'all hide it?
Hi John, While I agree 100% we need such a settings to allow fast vertical centering of text I think it's advisable to note that automatic accuracy is not the point in the case of a spine. I don't think such a settings would be as helpful as you might think in the case of a book spine for at least two good reasons: 1) the font used (and flavor of this font, including point size and caps use?all caps? caps and lowercase?, etc.) and 2) how this vertical center option would act on this specific font. The mathematics behind the scene will in some cases give excellent results, in others, no. This feature has proven its utility in other apps but at the same time it has weaknesses only a human eye can correct. One way to get around this with Scribus (and any other DTP app) is to put a guide in the center of the spine and then position precisely the text frame using the arrows or the mouse wheel in order to get the visual center of the type onto that centering guide. It will take seconds to achieve. Then, I would suggest you hard proof this and get the real feel of that spine by folding the proof on the folding marks. In some cases the text frames are really the boundaries of the text and in others such as in this case they are only a text holder we can freely adjust. There is no problem to have a text frame for a spine being larger than the spine itself or going off the spine margins. It's the text we are caring about, not the text frame. HTH Louis PS, the barcode generator is very handy! > _______________________________________________ > Scribus mailing list > Scribus at nashi.altmuehlnet.de > http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/attachments/20070701/dec88b59/attachment-0001.html
