How To: Scribus - Part 3
In this third article in the Scribus series we will discuss formatting text and creating 'paragraph styles' which will allow us to format text quickly and easily at the click of a mouse button.
Written by Ronnie Tucker
Anyone who has used OpenOffice extensively will know how time consuming it can be selecting chunks of text, applying bold, scrolling down, selecting more text, maybe changing the font type, font size and so on. Within Scribus we can set up 'Paragraph Styles' for text, for now, think of a paragraph style as just being a shortcut that will do most of the work for you.
Let's create a paragraph style. Here's my document from last month.
Now in the Scribus menu choose Edit > Paragraph Styles
This window allows us to create - and edit - paragraph styles that we will use in our document. Click New.
From this window we can edit all of the styles properties. Everything from font style, distance between paragraph lines, bold, italic, paragraph orientation and colour. Have a play around with the settings to get a paragraph style you like:
Ok, I've picked a rather garish looking font, orientation and colouring but it's to make it stand out more in the screenshots, you would obviously choose something a bit more pleasing on the eye!
With your style chosen, it's time to save it. At the top of the window you'll see a text entry box that currently says 'New Style' in here type a meaningful name. I'll call mine 'important' and I'll use it for important text. And click OK. And there it shows in our list of Paragraph Styles.
And click ok to safely close that window.
Now the important thing about Paragraph Styles is that it works on paragraphs. I hate to state the obvious but as you can see in our document so far: there are no paragraphs. So to add some paragraphs I'll edit the text and add a few carriage returns (Enter key)
You can see I have a definite paragraph in the right column, so for this example I want to make that paragraph have a different style from the rest of the text. Normally I'd have to select the block of text to alter the font type, size and so on, but not now! We have a paragraph style ready to do all the work for us. To apply our style to our paragraph we simply double click on our text box (to begin editing it) and place our flashing cursor within the paragraph we want to apply the style to. In the Properties window, click the Text tab. You'll see a dropdown menu titled Style, click where it says No Style or on the down arrow and you'll see your paragraph style.
Click the name of your paragraph style and your paragraph will suddenly take on the properties of your paragraph style.
You can also click once on a column and apply a paragraph style to the entire column.
The other good thing about Paragraph Styles is that any changes you make to the style is automatically applied to anywhere that style is applied within your document!
If I do Edit > Paragraph Styles, click my style name and click on the Edit button and change a few things:
Click OK to accept those changes, and click OK to close the Paragraph Styles window...
Voila! It automatically changes all instances of that paragraph style!
Play around with all the options in the Paragraph Styles window as it makes a big difference to your layout. A lot of publications effectively use a blank line after each line of text (to make for easier reading) so edit your line spacing to about the height of your text to get that effect. Some publications will have their words spread out to cover the full width of the column which can look good but can also fail miserably if your last line only has three short words and they are spread our across a wide area so be careful with that.
Paragraph Styles are a great time saver and you will need them within your publication for various types of text. For example: on this page that you're reading now, it has a paragraph style for the small introductory text (at the top of the page) and a style for the main body of the article. Some pages have a style for the small caption text under photographs.
Similarly, to standardise your colours within the publication you can create Colour Styles, but we'll discuss that in Part 4.
Next month we'll look at Colour Styles. This allows us to create a set of colours which will be used throughout the publication. It means we don't have to remember colour values, a real time saver!
