feeling overmatched

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cbarney

i'm a beginner at using scribus and i'm having second thoughts.

i need to layout a 50-page magazine, quite simply; it would have a cover with four different pages and then only a couple of other page types to lay out the rest of the material. i came to scribus after trying microsoft word, apple pages and freeway express.

i am having a great deal of difficulty with it, partly, i think, because i am using version 1.4.1 and online manual is for 1.3 and many of the screens are  different (i'm using a mac running snow leopard).

so --  will it help me to go back to 1.3?

or am i perhaps in over my head. i am not a professional designer, i'm a writer, and i don't want to lay out a lot of magazines, only one (at least for now).

i have had experience working on magazines and in magazine production. i understand scribus's emphasis on layout and the reason for its rudimentary word processing. i still have a lot trouble entering text and images and getting them to stay put.

how steep is the learning curve here?

thanks for any tips --

cliff

cbarney

didn't mean freeway express; that's for website design.

-- cliff

utnik

hi cliff

your request is not really specific – i'll try to provide some guidelines in general...

  • first take a look at all the menu entries and the preference panel
  • many object oriented options are collected in the properties window – if your screen is large enough, keep it open all the time (otherwise remember the shortcut: F2)
  • the online manual is a bit outdated, but still useful for most general tasks...
  • you will need to work with masterpages and/or page templates (in scribus masterpages are backgrounds for your layout – the content is fix!)
  • i recommend to build a grid with guides and make them 'magnetic' ('page' → 'snap to guides')
  • you need to deal with printer related stuff like pdf-standards, color management, safety margins and bleeds – ask your print shop early, what standards they need
all complex software requires some learning – be patient...

utnik

Nermander

I'd say your problem is not with Scribus, it with knowing how to design a layout in a page layout program.

Once you know what to do, it's not hard to learn how to do it in Scribus.

First up: Don't create you text in Scribus. Create it in for example OpenOffice or LibreOffice writer, or even just in plain text files.

I can't understand how you have problems getting images to stay in place, in Scribus images are placed in separate frames and they do NOT move automatically (that is an often requested feature: the possibility to make image frames move with content).

Create the layout first, using dummy images and dummy texts. Then fill the layout it with content. Keeping layout and content separated as much as possible is one of the keys to good workflow.

a.l.e

hi cliff,

currently, we don't have a "modern" how to on how to start to work with scribus and create a magazine...

but there is some hope...

last week i gave a (short) workshop on creating a newspaper/magazine with scribus and i plan to publish my notes as a "starting with scribus" free handbook... but it won't happen before the end of the summer.

so, for now, the best thing is that you use the help you get when you press F1 and ask us specific questions about your the problems you're facing.

ah, and following the hints you got until now, is not a bad idea :-)

have a nice evening
a.l.e