Help:Manual Textframes

Table of Contents

Working with Text Unlike using a wordprocessor, Scribus uses a frames environment. Therefore, you cannot simply enter text on a document page. See Working with Frames to learn about frame creation and manipulation. Once you have a text frame, your task now is to put some text into it. You may place text into a text frame in the following ways:  Using Story Editor. Directly into the frame on the main screen. Importing text from a plain text file. Importing from selected formatted files, such as ODT, HTML, CSV. There are other file formats such as DOC files which can import only the text without any formatting. You can also set up custom tags in text files to act as a filter for formatting on import. 

Using Story Editor This is listed first because it is the recommended way to enter text manually from the keyboard. Bring up the Story Editor (SE) from the Context menu or with Ctrl+T. Because SE is very versatile, it will be covered in detail in its own section. Its main disadvantage is that you will not see the final appearance of the text until you update the frame, with or without exiting SE. SE is also a convenient way to create, edit, and apply Paragraph and Character Styles. On the Main Screen A selected frame can enter Edit Contents mode by clicking the Edit Contents icon on the toolbar or double-clicking on the frame (keyboard: E). The advantage of this is that you can see immediately the appearance of your additions or edits. It is a bit slower, since screen refreshes are involved. You can use Properties to change the font, style, and other characteristics such as linespacing. For small edits and frames which only contain a small amount of text, Edit Contents can serve your needs well. Inline Graphics You may also insert any graphics in a line of text. Simply copy the item (Ctrl+C, for example), then paste into the line of text while in Edit Contents mode. This will not work in Story Editor.

Importing Text From a File We'll collapse our above list a bit, so that we consider all these unformatted, formatted, and tagged files close together.

Plain Text Clicking Get Text will bring up a file dialog and by default look for files ending in .csv, .html, .htm, .odt, .pdb, .sxw, and .txt, so if you save a plain text file, try to save as *.txt. You can also import .doc files in Linux if you have installed antiword – on Windows versions of Scribus this is already present. If the frame has content that you want to add to, use Append Text instead. While appending text works in both Select Item and Edit Contents modes, they both will append text at the end. 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.

CSV, HTML, and ODT files  CSV files (comma-separated values) are typically generated by spreadsheet or database programs, but they are simple enough that they could be created with a text editor. The data will be arranged so that a comma or some other character tells Scribus when the next field is coming, and a newline tells when the next row comes in the file. On importation, you have an opportunity to declare the separator, and also declare a value separator, typically quotation marks. The value separator is optional, and would be used to allow the inclusion of a comma inside the field. If you check that the first row is a header, those values will be made bold. When Scribus pulls in the data, it will use tabs between the fields. For the header row, these will be center-type and for the rest left-type. Considering the wide variety of HTML tags, it shouldn't be surprising that there are limitations to what Scribus can interpret from an HTML file. It will interpret text only between the &lt;body&gt; and &lt;/body&gt; tags and mainly focus on recognizing headers, paragraph and line breaks, and text styles, though the styles available may depend on the fonts on the system. You can expect at least some extraneous text in a complex HTML file. Scribus will assign styles to variously formatted text.</li> ODT files (from OpenOffice.org) are the recommended format when you want to automatically assign Scribus styles to text you import into a frame. Generally a very good to excellent result can be expected for recognizing and assigning styles, provided that you use styles in oowriter. This can also be a workaround for DOC or other files, by importing into oowriter and then saving as an ODT file. You cannot expect good results importing tables in this fashion, even in an ODT file.</li> </ul>

Tagged Files

Context Menu

Linking Text Frames

Linking Existing Text Frames

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.

Properties: Text

Baseline Grid

Color & Effects Style Settings Here in the Properties palette, we can only set an already created style. An explanation on creating and editing styles is found in WwStyles.html Working with Styles.

First Line Offset

Columns and Text Distances

Tabulators

Optical Margins

Advanced Settings

Word Tracking and Glyph Extension 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.