Scribus Forums

Scribus => Beginner Talk => Topic started by: Ged on March 11, 2016, 05:14:22 AM

Title: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: Ged on March 11, 2016, 05:14:22 AM
I have created my master pages, loaded my book to the story editor, and started formatting my pages one at a time.  From time to time little accidents happen, and sometimes my finished pages lose a little bit of formatting, text size, spacing, etc.

I know how to lock guides, but is it possible to lock an entire page (when its finished) without locking the remaining unfinished story?
Title: Re: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: GarryP on March 11, 2016, 10:47:34 AM
Unfortunately, for what I think you want, you can't "lock" changes by page. You actually can't "lock" much.

You can only lock specific objects/groups/layers and even then the "lock" only applies to certain aspects of the object(s) and can never apply to everything about those objects.

By way of a simple example, suppose you created a rectangle and coloured it red, then locked it. Then you want to change the red colour. Should the object still use the original red colour or change to the new one? Should the red colour be locked "globally" to avoid changes because something that is coloured red is locked and therefore everything that is red can't have its colour changed?

And the problem gets much more complicated when you start thinking about text. What if you lock a text frame but then modify a style that is used in that frame? Should the frame stay as it was - thus creating new temporary formatting to cope with the change - while everything else changes? And what about text flow and hyphenation? What if you lock a text frame that is in the middle of a chain and then change something about a frame earlier in the chain?

And what if a style used in a frame uses the baseline grid and you lock the frame but then change the baseline grid size? What happens to the text in that frame? The list of questions just goes on and on.

Once you start to think about this kind of thing it becomes obvious that locking can't really apply to much more than size, position and shape. Content locking isn't a plausible concept without some horrendously complicated mechanism in place to check for everything that could change.

As for your issue with formatting changing "by accident", Scribus usually doesn't change stuff by itself. It should only change things according to user input. However, if you think Scribus is making changes "behind your back" then I'd say that was a bug to be fixed rather than something you should have to try and stop happening manually. Do you have any examples that you can cite where changes have been made without you making them?
Title: Re: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: Ged on March 11, 2016, 11:26:02 AM
Quote from: GarryP

As for your issue with formatting changing "by accident", Scribus usually doesn't change stuff by itself. It should only change things according to user input. However, if you think Scribus is making changes "behind your back" then I'd say that was a bug to be fixed rather than something you should have to try and stop happening manually. Do you have any examples that you can cite where changes have been made without you making them?

Several actually.  I had double pages displayed, and was working on the right hand side.  I selected the text and was applying 'line height' (leading) when my heading on the first page jumped from 16 pt to 12 pt.  I hadnt even touched it.
Title: Re: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: GarryP on March 11, 2016, 01:32:09 PM
It sounds like you have linked/chained text frames.

Text formatting, when changed at the PP/Text-Tab level with a frame selected, is applied to all of the text that the frame is using including any other frames that are in the same chain. Formatting at this level also overrules style formatting.

Say you have three frames A, B and C that are linked/chained so that text flows from A to B to C. If you select frame B and change the line spacing, the line spacing will change in all three frames. The text might be "contained" in frame A but it's the text that is being formatted, not the frame.

This is expected behaviour. Is this what's happening?
Title: Re: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: Ged on March 11, 2016, 09:22:52 PM
Yes, my frames are linked.  I have my entire book on a text file, and I cut n pasted it into Scribus.  Then I flow it from page to page via the text boxes.  Isn't that how it is supposed to be done?

When I do the same thing in Pagemaker, the story flows from the start of the book till it ends.  If any particular page needs different specifications you just do it, and the other pages are not affected.  Are you saying Scribus can't do that?
Title: Re: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: GarryP on March 12, 2016, 10:58:56 AM
In Scribus, text is formatted with no regard to the frame that it happens to be displayed in. The only way that the frame can influence how text is drawn is how the frame shape interacts with where the glyphs are drawn. Text formatting applies to the text, not the frames.

Doing things this way means that you can delete frames and re-flow text into other frames without losing any of the formatting. If the formatting was applied at a frame level then you'd lose formatting if you deleted a frame. Having all of the text formatting applied to the text rather than the frames seems a much better way of doing things, to me at least.

My first recommendation to you would be to use styles for formatting text in any documents that are non-trivial. They rarely take more than a few extra clicks and keyboard strokes to set up than applying formatting directly and they can save so much time later on that it's silly not to use them. The formatting follows the text regardless of where it is.

My second recommendation would be to split your text up into sections or chapters and only link text frames within those sections/chapters that need to be linked. I'm assuming that your sections/chapters start on new pages so that's a natural place to start a new chain. (If, for example, you have forty linked text frames and you edit the text in the first frame, Scribus has to recalculate the positions of all of the glyphs in all forty frames to compensate for that edit, which could slow things down unnecessarily.) Keeping links down to a minimum in this way will only be helpful. Too many links just makes things awkward.
Title: Re: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: HansWoltjes on March 18, 2016, 04:22:57 PM
I'm new to this forum and i do not seem to have a start new topic button  :o
Title: Re: Locking pages - preventing accidents
Post by: GarryP on March 20, 2016, 01:22:54 PM
You should be able to see the New Topic button at the top of each forum as shown in the attachment.

[attachment deleted by admin]