Text flow spacing around and in boxes

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bigal

Comming from a background of web design and CSS and being a novice, and an amateur, at DTP I am having dificulty setting the spacing around and in boxes with Scribus. I am used to setting the border width and padding with CSS and guess that it is mostly a terminology thing. EMs in CSS set the sizes automatically according to the text size, also in EMs, to reflect the viewers browser defaults. Scribus is for printed documents. A different ball game completely.

I am at a loss to see how I can present a 'buffer' zone around boxes. Both inside text boxes and also around, outside, of all boxes/shapes. The aim being to stop text from butting tight up to to the box 'frame' (Don't as yet know if even that is the correct DTP adjective). As I said, I expect I am looking in the wrong place due to my novices inexperience of DTP terminology. Can any one help this ancient dunderhead please?

Alan

PS. I am amused to see that the Scribus forum spell checker picks up Scribus as an error!
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

Wena

bigal, what you would call the buffer zone is what we call the bled area. A book or any publication normally will  get trimmed and to correct measurements. The text in no problem filling the text box, the red line dose not show when you render it as a photo or a PDF file.

Hope this helps

Wena

Nermander

No, this does not sound like bleed.

Frames have a contour line, that is the edge that is used for wrapping text. It can me "grown" with a fixed amount outside the frame content.

bigal

Hi both, and thank you for replying.

Wena, my understanding of a bleed are is that it is the, for want of a better description, non printing area, that is left around the outside of the document. The bit the printers can cut off when they trim the finished paper/magazine/book etc. to size after binding. Am I wrong in that?

Nermander, if I have a picture or graphic on a page that has text  surrounding it I want to set boundaries around that picture or graphic so that there is a little clear white (or page background color) space between the text and the picture. Just to make the text more readable.

At the moment I am setting up two concentric boxes with the inner one being 2 or 3 mm smaller on all sides and containing the picture or graphic. This then provides the separation that I am seeking to attain. It is, though both an ugly and time consuming solution to a problem that I am sure is easy to solve with existing tools. I just do not know what to call the 'gap' so do not know where to look for a more elegant solution.

Cheers

Alan
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)

GarryP

Alan, if I think I've read your original question right you're trying to make sure that the text doesn't go right to the edge of the text frame.

If you're wanting this because, for example, the text frame has a visible border and you want to put some distance between the text and border you could look at the "Columns and Text Distances" section in the "Text" tab of the "Properties" window. This, among other things, allows you to set a distance from the top/bottom/left/right of the frame. If you try it you'll see another rectangle appear inside the text frame showing you where this new "inner frame" is.

If, however, you've got text frames next to each other and you don't want the text from one frame touching the text of the adjoining frame, you can just move one frame a bit to the side so they don't touch. In DTP you can put the frames wherever you want them on the page, unlike CSS where the renderer tries to "crush" everything together (making you add padding etc.).

From your second post it seems like you're trying to add a space around an image so that the text around it doesn't touch the image. When I started with Scribus I used the exact same method you've been using. However there's a much better way as mentioned by Nermander.

Create your image frame. Then in the "Shape" tab of the "Properties" window select "Use Contour Line". Then, in the same tab, press the "Edit..." button. This will bring up a node editing window. Check the "Edit Contour Line" option near the bottom of the window. You'll see some "Enlarge" icons near the left-middle of the window and pressing one of them will enlarge the contour line of the image by either a percentage or an amount depending on which icon you choose. You'll notice the blue box around the image get bigger. This contour line is what the text will flow around. You can edit this line more by using the other options in the window but for basic rectangular images you can probably just go for the basic rectangular contour line. Press the "End Editing" button when you're done.

I hope some of this helps.

bigal

Oh boy! So simple. And by dragging the green handles you can alter the shape as well if you want. Thank you so much GarryP.

One very happy beginner.

Alan
Absolute space exits no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. (Henri Poncaire. 1854-1912)