Master Page Design

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miksnake

I am trying to figure out how to do the following, or if Scribus can do it at all. My background is a ton of Quark Xpress work many years ago. I haven't done much desktop publishing in quite a while and not really anything outside of Quark.

Now, I'm trying to acquaint myself with Scribus for a newsletter project.

What I'm trying to do is set a basic layout design that is relatively fixed. I would have called it using Master Pages but that's not how Master Pages seem to work in Scribus.

For the newsletter I have several design elements in each issue that keep the same design but have different text. For example, there will be the title box on the first page that has the newsletter name and a text box/frame for the month/date, volume/issue, etc. Also, there's a picture on the front page with a caption text box/frame underneath. These elements should always remain the same with the same frame width and color as well as background color. But, I need to be able to update the picture, change the text in the caption and the volume/issue number, etc.

Is there a way to do this in Scribus, so the frames/boxes don't move or at least are already set but the elements inside them can be changed.

It seems like saving as a template is the closest I can get but that still doesn't seem like the ideal solution. Quark was very good at this. You'd work on a master page and every page that used that master page as its template would have all the elements from that master page. But, you could still change those elements on each page. It worked very well.

Thanks for any help, suggestions or ideas.

a.l.e

hi mik,

in scribus, master pages are a set of background layer for your pages.

if you want to use pre-formatted (group of) elements you can put them in the scrapbook and define guides in the master pages for easily place them on the real pages.
(the context menu on the item will give you an "add to scrapbook" action)

on top of it: double clicking on the scrapbook item will place it at the place where it was when you added it to the scrapbook...

ciao
a.l.e

Nermander

Also there is the possibility to lock objects, and locking (if it has not been changed since last I used it) only affects the properties (position, size etc) and not the content. Thus for a locked image frame you can still change the image, but the placement and size of the frame is fixed.