On 04/29/2011 06:18 PM, Ray McInnis wrote: > hello: > > a newbie to scribus, i am having some success, and some failures, > basically blundering my way. > > (the mail should bring schaefer's manual today.) > > i work in both linux and windows, -- and this is one of my blunders, out > which i was extracted by a friend -- and made the mistake of downloading > scribus 1.4 (still in beta). > > i have three questions: > > 1) with scribus 1.3, how do you paste a whole odt file into a scribus > file, and, page by page, have the the entire file distributed evenly? > Hi Ray. The first thing to say is that you have a lot of reading to do, and it's good that you've ordered the manual. Scribus, like most DTP programs, works in a frames environment. The page you see when you start a document is just a virtual space to work in. The actual content, whether it's text, images, some sort of graphic, is in a container called a frame. You make a text frame for text, image frame for an image. If you want an image in the midst of text, you will need an image frame superimposed on a text frame. Because of this frames structure and all the variables such as font size, linespacing, and so on, a page of an ODT file may or may not correspond to a single page-sized text frame. One thing worth mentioning is that when you start a document, the dialog that pops up will let you create a number of pages, and also automatic text frames. If you create a number of pages, these frames will automatically be linked, so that if you load your ODT file into the first page's text frame it will automatically flow into the next page's frame, and if you need to add more pages later, these too will automatically have text frames and be linked to the previous page's text frame (if you have selected automatic frames at the beginning). While you wait for your manual to arrive, check out the online manual inside of Scribus (F1 > Documentation), which has a less verbose and less complete collection that should help you get started. The section Scribus Basics should be particularly helpful. There is also the Scribus wiki, but I think this will likely be more helpful after you've gotten some basic sense of Scribus.
> 2) where do you find out the functions of the commands p30, p31, etc? > Not sure what you mean -- I'm not aware of such commands. Where are you seeing this? > 3) where do you find recommended page formatting settings? > When you start Scribus or click to start a new document, you get a dialog with your default settings, which should be A4 paper, units in points, a single page, no automatic frames, and the default margins. You can change these settings each time you make a new document, but you can also reset the defaults to whatever you would like, under File > Preferences > Document, but of course there are numerous other settings you can change under Preferences. Greg
