Design a professional looking magazine
John Knight attempts to make sense of the scary magazine editor Scribus and finds that the fuss was much ado about nothing.
We had a certain trepidation taking on Scribus. Although it’s much more powerful than something like Microsoft Publisher, the interface is completely different to what most people are used to, which gives it an intimidating reputation. But this reputation is undeserved, and it can be an excellent way to get into do it yourself publishing.
Covering all of Scribus could fill an entire magazine, so instead we’ll take you through the primary elements of the interface, giving you enough to get started. We’ll be focusing on making a magazine, but the same principles can be applied to anything like a community newsletter or a school newspaper.
The easiest way to get into Scribus is to work from a template, and for many projects it may be sufficient to simply find a template you like and just replace the text and images. So we’ll begin with a template, and then start from scratch to explore the rest of the GUI.
NO NEW IDEAS
When you start Scribus, the New Document window will open automatically with the New Document tab, ready to start from scratch. We’re not quite ready for that yet, so if you look to the right, the next tab is called New from Template. Here you’ll find a reasonably large selection of templates with a description on the right.
To keep things simple we decided on ‘Newsletter 1’. It’s quite straightforward in its layout, its images are all free, and its author has designed it so you can simply replace any text or images with your own.
Although the controls in Scribus can get quite technical, at its heart it’s quite simple and revolves around two concepts: everything sits in frames and it’s all stacked in layers.
Scribus is designed primarily around Text Frames and Image Frames. Whether you’re working on text or images, either kind of frame can be resized or reshaped to taste, and you can generally replace any existing content with whatever you like. Let’s start with text.
ADDING TEXT
Pick any text frame you like and right-click. A menu will appear with quite a number of options, but for now we’ll be looking at two: Get Text and Edit Text. Get Text will take the content from an external file and put it straight into the frame. Very cool, but you’re more likely to just copy and paste into Edit Text.
Edit Text opens the Story Editor window, which resembles a basic word processor. Most of the controls you should be able to guess, though there are a few oddities. When you’re done editing you can just click the big green tick button. However, there’s no preview function in the Story Editor, so you’ll need to keep clicking Edit Text every time you want to make a change.
It’s better to move the Story Editor to the side so you can see the original text frame you want to edit. Then when you’ve made some changes, click Update Text Frame from the Story Editor’s main toolbar and you’ll see your original text frame change in the main window.
IMAGE CONTROL
To replace an image, right-click in the frame and choose Get Image. This will open a file browser. Click OK when you’ve chosen your image. The picture frame will now have your image but unless the aspect ratio was the same the dimensions will probably be wonky, with some white space left in the frame, or only part of the image.
To alter an image’s dimensions right-click the image and choose Properties. In the Properties window, click the Image tab. The options Scale To Frame Size and Proportional might be enabled. If so, then one possible fix for a badly filled frame is to uncheck the Proportional box, which will then stretch the image to fit the frame.
However, this may look horrid, so you can fine-tune the image by clicking the Free Scaling option, where you can move and stretch the image to your heart’s content. Or you can resize the picture frame to fit.
In the Newsletter 1 template the image and text frames are locked in place, meaning that you can’t resize them. To unlock the frames, right-click any image or text frame and uncheck the option ‘Is Locked’, and you can now resize the frame as much as you want.
With any luck, working from a template will have been sufficient to create the document you wanted. If so, save your work and export it. The native Scribus format is .sla, but if you’re sending your work to anyone other than a fellow Scribus user, you need to use something more universal like PDF. That’s easily done, by clicking File>Export>Save as PDF.
Note that in both exporting files and in Print Preview you’ll likely encounter warning messages. That’s quite normal – Scribus is pretty pedantic! Ignore them, you’ll probably be fine.
FROM SCRATCH
If you have something more specific in mind a template probably won’t cut it, meaning you’ll need to build up your own document from scratch. But don’t worry, we’re here to take you through the basics.
For a starting point, if you have something like a magazine whose style you want to imitate it’s worth getting out a ruler and measuring the dimensions of every box, row, image, and column. The Scribus layout can be set to operate within physical dimensions, meaning you should be able to replicate the formatting elements of your favourite magazine.
Muggins here and his brother have been trying to replicate the style and feel of Commodore Format from the early ‘90s, so we can work on our own book and provide a cool template for other retro gaming authors. Aside from copying the physical dimensions and styling language, those magazines usually had a three column layout, so that’s a good place to begin. Bring some formatting ideas of your own and we’ll get started.
Click File>New to start afresh and the New Document window will appear, where you define your layout. To keep things simple we’ll stick with a Single Page layout. Otherwise everything’s fairly conventional except the choice of Default Unit, which is “Points (pt)”. Goodness knows what that means, so switch it to something useful like millimetres!
Now you can easily define the page margins on the left, and if you check the “Automatic Text Frames” box, you can set the number of columns and the gap between them. If you just want a normal full page of text leave Columns as 1, but most magazines use two or three columns, and newspapers usually use four.
TEXT FRAMES
When you click OK you’ll have a blank page with three columns, if that was your choice. The column markers will act as visual guides, and if you check your work in Print Preview you’ll see these ugly things are thankfully not included! The obvious place to start would be with some text, so let’s create our first Text Frame.
In the middle of the main toolbar is the Insert Text Frame button. On your blank page click and place your first frame wherever you like. You can even overlap the column guides and page borders if you want – this can be changed though, see the box on guides for more information. Note that Scribus will switch back to Select Item mode after you’ve inserted a frame, so you’ll need to click the button each time you want to generate a new text frame.
To add text use the same method as before, right-clicking and choosing Edit Text. If you happen to run out of space in your first frame, don’t worry. Create a few more blank frames and we can explore one of the coolest features in Scribus: linked text frames, where text flows seamlessly from one frame to the next.
Start by selecting the frame from which all other frames will be linked. If you click Link Text Frames from the main toolbar, your mouse pointer will change to an image of two text frames with a linking arrow. When you click the next frame they will be linked.
Now you never need worry about having too much text for one box. Just write away to your heart’s content and whatever doesn’t fit in the first frame will simply run into the next. You can do this multiple times to create elaborate designs. You can link frames up or down, in any direction. You can even skip over other frames, leaving space in the middle.
Whenever you link multiple frames Scribus will use arrows to show which frames are linked and in which direction. You’ll know if a frame is linked if you click it and you’re given the option to use the Unlink Text Frames button. If you do so, Scribus will actually point to the frame about to be Unlinked, just to be helpful.
IMAGE FRAMES
Inserting an image frame is the same process as a text frame. Click the Insert Image Frame button in the main toolbar, then click and drag the dimensions of the frame to suit. Right-click inside the frame and choose Get Image which opens the file browser. Like text frames you need to click the Insert Image Frame button each time you want to make a new one.
As in the template section, your image will probably be the wrong size and resolution for the frame you’ve just made. To fix it, right-click the image and choose Properties. In Properties click the Image tab and choose Scale To Frame Size.
If Proportional is checked, the image will maintain its original aspect ratio. If so then there will likely be some leftover bits of frame, so you’ll need to move back the borders to suit the image. If you leave Proportional unchecked the image will be stretched to fill the frame.
For elements such as clipart and small logos, you’ll probably want to have transparent backgrounds. Transparent backgrounds enable you to have a background colour, and placing a new image over the top won’t leave clashing borders or colours. It’ll also help in the next two sections, with bold shapes you want to layer over something else, or when having text flow around a frame.
CONTROL LAYERS
Once you start getting into images used within layers, that’s where Scribus really starts to get interesting. With layers you can create complex imagery and work on parts of a scene independently without upsetting anything else.
For instance, you can have a static background image and then place your own images on top – which by the way, is a primary technique in animation. In fact, if you think of an animator with pieces of celluloid, where they stack individual drawings over backgrounds, it’s the same concept. Anything you do in one layer won’t affect whatever is above or below it.
Indeed, if you try to approach Scribus from a reference point of something perhaps like Microsoft Word, everything will appear alien and nightmarishly complicated. But if you
“Once you start getting into images used within layers, that’s where Scribus really starts to get interesting. ”
think in terms of actual pieces of paper, celluloid, and scissors then it all becomes much easier to grasp.
For a good example of layering we thought we’d look to the vintage gaming magazines that we’re imitating, where they take bright edgy shapes and use them for eye-catching boxouts. First we’ll put a coloured polygon in an image frame, then put a text frame on top. Finally, we’ll put a pretty background behind it all.
First we created the image frame to fit both an image and a separate text frame inside it, which meant deliberately spilling over the column borders (which was a very 90s thing to do!).
To achieve the right size we opened the frame’s Properties, and opened the Image tab. From here we enabled Scale To Frame Size but didn’t enable Proportional, which meant we could resize the shape and frame to perfectly fit a paragraph inside. Next, we drew a text frame on top of the shape and inserted some informative and entertaining text.
Now is a good point to explore Scribus’s layer controls. For now the text is sitting above the image as it should be, but what if mis-clicking an option somehow got it the wrong way around – how would you correct that? So for now we’re deliberately going to obscure the text layer behind the image layer, but then bring it back again.
Right-click the text frame and choose Level>Lower. The text should now be hidden while the image sits on top. To bring back the text, you’ll need to lower the level of the image, so right-click and choose Level>Lower again. This will move the image back behind the text and restore the text layer to the top.
Now to give it all a background. We already prepared a simple background with a pretty colour-fade in using GIMP, though any portrait image should do. Then we simply drew an Image Frame across the entire page and inserted an image. Initially this just obscured everything, but by clicking Level>Lower to Bottom it put everything else back in the foreground while providing a nice background.
THE TEXT MUST FLOW
For the last piece of the puzzle, Scribus makes it possible to place graphics anywhere you like within text and force the surrounding text flow around it. If you create an image frame that overlaps text frames, you can try out the feature by rightclicking on the image, choosing Properties, and opening the Shape tab. In the field Text Flow Around Frame we want to focus on four options: Disabled, Use Frame Shape, Use Bounding Box, and Use Contour Line. Disabled turns off the feature entirely and text will just run over or under the image, ignoring its shape altogether. Use Frame Shape will make your text strictly adhere to whatever shape you have given the frame. Use Bounding Box will make sure that text will always conform to a perfectly rectangular field around the image. This can leave big empty gaps, but it may be just the look some people are going for.
For the advanced users out there, there’s the Use Contour Line option. This is hard to explain without a live demonstration, but this adds a second shape for text to flow around, independent of however the image may look right now.
The contour will be based on whatever the image’s original frame was, but by clicking Edit you can make the shape just about anything you like using some fairly intricate controls.
READY FOR MORE?
After you’ve finished your formatting and established a feel, you can create an entire magazine based upon your own style and tastes. You can also use this as a template, creating a distinct style your readers may enjoy.
This month we’ve only covered the basics of a magazine layout, taking a more text-based approach. Next month we’ll focus more on graphics, such as covers, posters, and so on.
Obviously this isn’t an environment to replace your word processor, but if this were something like Word or LibreOffice Writer, you would agonise endlessly trying to get a graphic to sit in the right place, constantly afraid you would upset the fragile formatting. In Scribus you just click this, drag that, and you’re done. The interface isn’t necessarily difficult, it’s just different. Stick with it and you’ll be rewarded.