Suggestion: Angled guides

[thorben]

Dear all,

I am a passionate scribus user, so before I start: thank you for the great work!

Over the years I have developed my own process of quickly creating templates for my photo books, mostly based on squares. For some pages I want to use a more dynamic layout and chose to use diamonds.

It is possible to create diamond shaped image frames already, but the alignment is... a pain.

In inkscape it is possible to rotate guides. You can double click on a guide and rotate it. That is a feature I would greatly appreciate to have in Scribus as well. Not only for the diamond shape layout, but sometimes I 'tilt' whole layouts to have them 'flow' from the lower left to the upper right (or vice versa). I usually do that by arranging all the frames, and then rotate the whole thing, but changes are not easily done after it is tilted.

I can upload some examples if anyone is interested.

Thank you!

[dragonfly]

I'm not using Scribus at the moment so this idea is unproven.
But could you write a python script to place in Scripter to use ImageMagick for selected object rotation?

Here is an example ..

https://codeyarns.com/2016/07/05/how-to-rotate-image-using-imagemagick/

[a.l.e]

hi thorben

on the one side, yes, having angled guides can be handy in some situations... but...

... doing layout is not the same as vector graphics and, in my experience, are far less needed in scribus than in inkscape.

personally, i would have needed them a couple of time in soo many years.

since it's a "exhotic" feature, you cannot really expect one of the core developers to work on that.

but it's probably not very hard to implement...

if somebody wants to work on it, he/she could first get into tweaking the guides by implementing the "guides snap to items" which is a bit simpler to program but very similar to the angled guides.

[thorben]

Hello a.l.e.,

thank your for your message!

I have attached a (crappy) picture I recently took to show an example of the layout where angled guides might be helpful. (I don't have access to the desktop right now where I process my pictures and layout)

I totally understand that they won't work on it if it's a rarely used feature - I am really grateful for the work open source software developers do. I guess was hoping I am not the only one who'd be excited to have that feature :-)

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[a.l.e]

what you're showing here, is a very interesting (and inspring) example.

so, we would also need columns and rows to be rotated...

[thorben]

I have used Inkscape to create a layout with angled guides, imported a png as a background to Scribus and then aligned the image frames to the boxes below.
It's sloppy (at least it's not accurate to the 3 digit after the decimal point), but it's comparably quick. Here are both files:

If anyone can think of a cleaner work around, I am happy to get suggestions :-)

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[a.l.e]

if your shapes are squares, using "snap to item" can also help.

but you will not get the padding between the boxes.
and it's a bit hard to get scribus to do the right thing...

[thorben]

SNAP TO OBJECT 

Sometimes you just need to think about a thing twice. I added a line in white around all the diamond shaped image frames, and have them snap to each other.

Thanks. That works like a charm. If you're interested I can upload some examples. Geeeeez, the possibilities are endless. *mindblown*

[a.l.e]

yeah, seeing the examples would be nice!

[thorben]

There you go:

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