How To: Scribus - Part 1 (continue)
But wait, that's not ten paragraphs! Why was the command ignored? The reason is because the text is actually flowing out the bottom of the text box. If you look closely at the bottom right of the text box, you'll see a small box with an 'X' in it.
This symbol tells us that there is not enought space in the box for all the text. We either need to enlarge it or have it flow into another box, otherwise, it will not be visible.
Drag out a new text box on the right half of the page, again, make it tall.
This is where the magic happens. Left click once, on the left column of text, this is where the text is to flow from. Now click the "Link Text Frames" button :
... and single left click on the right text box
Voila! Don't forget to click the Link Text Frames button again to turn it off, otherwise Scribus will think you want to continue linking boxes.
I should mention that the small red squares which show up on the corners of your text boxes are handles, they allow you to resize your text box. Play around with those handles and you'll see your text automatically update itself within the two linked text boxes...
Ok, time to save - and export - your work. From the menu, Select File -> Save as:... and enter a name for the document
to export the document as an Adobe... Select File -> Export from the menu, then chose "Save as pdf"
The Preflight Verifier Window should pop up.
Don't worry, this is the Preflight Verifier window. It checks your document for possible errors before you package it up as a PDF. In this case it's telling me that there's a text overflow on page 1. Fine, thats my ten paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum that doesn't fit into the two text boxes, no problem. Keep an eye on this Preflight Verifier window, it will save you getting a lot of phone calls from printers saying that there are things missing, or wrong, in your PDF! So in this case we click Ignore Errors and continue...
The Save as PDF window has a ton of options that relate to how the PDF file should look and what should be packaged inside the PDF file. We'll get into all that in a later part of this series for now, give your PDF file a name and click Save.
A window may briefly flash up, thats just Scribus converting the page to PDF, later, we'll see how with several pages it can take a few moments longer to convert to PDF.
So, let's look at out handy-work so far in a pdf viewer :
Beautiful! the screenshot shows the document in kpdf (KDE), but since it is pdf it will look the same regardless of what viewer you chose.
I hope you enjoyed the first part of the article, "Using Scribus."
Next month we'll add some images to our little sample page.
