how to change the color for some words ?

[nonplan]

Hello,
and happy new year to everybody !

I can't find a simple way to highlight some words with the color of my choice.
If I choose to put a color of my text box, all the box is colorised.
Some people suggest to put a box behind...
Do you know the regular way ?

thanks and sorry for my english !

[Nermander]

You want the background of the word colored? I think it can only be done using a box behind the word.

[GarryP]

I think Nermander is correct, as usual. I've tried a few experiments and I can't think of a way of highlighting some text in the way you mentioned other than drawing a shape manually and sending it behind the text.

You might find it difficult to get the shapes to be a consistent height if you draw them individually so a simple tip would be to draw one and get it just right (height, colour, etc.), then send it to the scrapbook. You can then drag the "standard" highlight from the scrapbook and change its width as needed.

One other tip I would give if you go down the "drawing coloured shapes behind the text" option is to do this only very near the end of your design phase. If you change the text in any way - any edit, or a change in hyphenation, or even just slightly tweaking a frame dimension - could move all of the text around and you'll have to check/move a lot of shapes.

One other thing I can point out is that this highlighting functionality has already been requested - Mantis issue 0010683 - and, if I'm reading it correctly, has been set as a 1.5.0 milestone (but I don't think that means it will definitely become a feature though).

A quick look at my 1.5.0svn installation doesn't show anything obvious but I've got an old build installed. If you're okay compiling your own software - unlike me, which is why I've still got an old version - you could try the latest version of 1.5.0svn and see if it contains the functionality you need but be warned that any files you save with 1.5.0svn cannot be read with earlier versions, so make a copy before you experiment.

I hope some of this helps.

[GarryP]

I've just had another idea which, while it's not ideal and might not be a viable option for your requirements, may be helpful to someone.

The idea is to do the highlighting in another application. Many PDF readers - Preview on OS X, for instance, but not Adobe Reader (from what I can see, but I could be wrong) - allow you to make annotations such as highlighting. So you could produce your final - unhighlighted - document using Scribus and do the highlighting with a PDF reader. Then save the highlighted document as your "final final" version.

You'd have to leave the highlighting until the very end of the document production process but, as I mentioned in my previous post, you'd probably want to do this anyway if you went down the "drawing shapes" route.

Like I said, it's not ideal, and I know some PDF readers don't do highlighting very well. But you could give it a try on a test document and see if it's good enough for what you want in this circumstance.

There are many free PDF readers out there so if the one(s) you already have don't do what you want there are plenty of others to try. And if this is just for a one-off requirement you could always download a time-limited demo of a commercial product when you're ready to use it, then just uninstall it when you're done.

[nonplan]

Thank you Nermander and GarryP for your answer and your generous tips.
Until scribus got this option (hope), I'll try with a linux PDF reader.
greets
greg