Become a DTP guru
Aspiring media mogul Nick Peers reveals how to design newsletters, flyers and more with Scribus, the powerful open-source DTP tool.
Nick Peers reveals how to design your own newsletters, flyers and more with this powerful open-source tool that’s been around almost as long as the kernel.
Word processors like LibreOffice Writer can do a great job of sprucing up documents, but if you’re serious about page design, you can’t beat a dedicated desktop publishing tool. Scribus is capable of producing anything from brochures and flyers to full-blown newsletters, which you can print or share digitally via PDF as you see fit.
It’s packed with powerful tools and options, but in this tutorial we’ll introduce you to the fundamentals of using Scribus: from changing existing content to designing your own documents from scratch. It can be installed or run several different ways: via AppImage, using its own dedicated PPA, or through Flatpak. While the stable version (1.4.x) is listed as ‘recommended’, it’s been effectively abandoned because the current development version (1.5.7) is on the cusp of replacing it, so we’ll be focusing on that version in this tutorial. The PPA version is best for those running the nonLTS version of Ubuntu, currently 21.04:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scribus/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install scribus-ng
If you’re on the LTS release cycle (Ubuntu 20.04) install Scribus through Flatpak if you have that installed, or use the portable AppImage if not (https:// sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribusdevel/1.5.7). If you’re using Flatpak:
$ flatpak install flathub net.scribus.Scribus
Once installed, Scribus can be launched via the Show Applications button. It’ll be described as Scribus (Beta), but don’t worry – it’s as close to stable as you can get.
First steps
On first launch, you’ll be taken to the New Document window where you have a choice of four options: New Document, New from Template, Open Existing Document, and Open Recent Document. The New Document option enables you to create a single blank page or ‘facing pages’ (a ‘spread’, in publishing parlance).
To start using Scribus, switch to the ‘New From Template’ tab where you’ll see a selection of templates, split into categories such as books and brochures. Start with a newsletter – pick Newsletter 2 and read through the ‘About’ description. It’s a simple black and white A4 newsletter template where you right-click existing images and text to change it to your chosen content.
Click OK and you’ll be warned the file was created in Scribus 1.3.3 – click OK again. Next, if the Font Substitution box pops up with a warning telling you the document’s fonts (Bitstream Vera family) are missing, then cancel opening the document, close Scribus and install the missing fonts via the Terminal:
$ sudo apt install ttf-bitstream-vera
Reopen Scribus and create the newsletter template again – it should now work.
Edit texts
The main Scribus window will open to show you the first page of your newsletter. It looks rather bare, so let’s start by seeing how you edit existing components.
Double-click inside the ‘Newsletter Title’ text box, where you should now be able to edit the text in the usual manner. Replace this with the title of your newsletter, then select all the text and look to replace the font with something more striking.
This is done using the Text Properties box, a floating window you can bring up via the Windows menu or by pressing F3. Click the font drop-down at the top to try an alternative font and size – see the box (below) for some hints and tips involving font selection.
The Text Properties box has more options too: line spacing will be relevant when formatting multi-column text to ensure it all lines up correctly. Anyone who’s used DTP software should recognise most of the options on offer – including the tracking and word spacing controls under Advanced Settings – but for most people the basics should be sufficient.
Once you’ve formatted your newsletter text, you can move on to the rest of the text. When it comes to longerformatted text, directly editing it in the Scribus window can be a little fiddly. Instead, click inside the text box and press Ctrl+T. This opens the Story Editor window with the current text on display inside. It’s similar to your word processor, with one key difference – on the left you’ll see each paragraph is assigned its own formatting style: Article First Paragraph, Article Following Paragraph, and so on.
Formating text
Consistent formatting is key to creating professionallooking documents, and this can be achieved by applying styles to entire paragraphs. You can change existing styles by right-clicking the current style displayed in the left-hand pane and then clicking the drop-down menu that pops up to select an alternative, but how do you edit these styles to fit your own design?
Press F4 (or choose Edit>Styles) to open the Style Manager to define both paragraph and character styles. Paragraph styles can be defined from scratch, or you can save time by defining common character styles and applying those to your paragraph styles.
Start by selecting Default Character Style and clicking Edit. This is where you can define the default font that can be used to build your paragraph styles down to the smallest detail. Once done, click Apply – any existing text based on that character style will automatically update, revealing another advantage of styles: you can make wholesale changes without having to reformat everything from scratch.
You can edit existing styles and add new ones of your own. After choosing your default character style, you can then start to build out your paragraph styles. As you’d expect, these add extra elements such as line spacing, margins, tabs and indentation, and text alignment. The Paragraph Effects tab is where you can define bullet and number lists, as well as choose drop caps. The latter is a great tool to draw people’s eye to the start of an article.
You’ll also see a Character Style tab – you can select your previously defined character style here, then make adjustments (for example, to choose a different style and size for a header or other page element) or – if you’re not bothering to use character styles – define this paragraph’s character style from scratch.
To speed up the generation of paragraph styles, you can also base new styles on existing ones. They’ll then inherit all the characteristics of that previous style, enabling you to concentrate on defining the characteristics unique to that specific style. You could, for example, define a default paragraph style, then use it
to generate additional paragraph styles such as the first article in a paragraph, or a crosshead – a sub-heading within the text itself. Anything specifically defined within the new style overrides the style it’s based on.
Working with images
Our newsletter template has space for a single image. To fill this with a new image, right-click it and choose Content>Get image (or press Ctrl+I). The image will be placed full-size within the picture frame, so will require adjusting. Right-click the image and expand the Image sub-menu where you’ll be able to adjust the frame to the image or – more likely – resize the image to fit the frame (choose Adjust Image to Frame). This will resize the image to fit the frame, while respecting its aspect ratio, so there will likely be space below or to the side of the image depending on its aspect ratio.
Other options you’ll see include Image Effects (add up to 10 different effects, then tweak each one using the preview to see the effect they’ll have), Edit Image (opens the image in the image editor you specify under File> Preferences>External Tools, which is set to GIMP by default), and Embed Image. Selecting this will convert the image from a link to an actual object within the file. You’d do this if you wanted to share the document with someone else and not have to worry about including all the images as separate files.
Understanding frames
So far we’ve respected the newsletter’s layout and focused on populating it with content. You’ll notice that text and images reside in frames, and that these can be moved, resized, rotated and more – press F2 to open the Frame Properties window to access these options.
With images, we’ve already seen how we can resize images to fit inside their frames, leaving some white space beneath or to the side. Complete the job by rightclicking the image again, but this time choosing Image> Adjust Frame to Image. You’ll see the frame now fit around the image, leaving white space beneath it.
The next step is to move the caption frame so it sits underneath the image again. By default, the template has locked all its frames so they can’t be accidentally moved. To fix this, right-click the frame and choose
Locking>Is Locked. You’ll see the frame change to reveal drag handles – click and drag it to a new location, or use the arrow keys to nudge it around the screen.
Now’s the perfect time to discover how you can group frames together, so they act as a single object. Doing so would enable you to move the image and its caption as one: just hold the Shift key as you click each frame you’d like to group and you’ll see the selection box encompasses all selected frames. You could drag this to a new location, or choose Item>Grouping>Group to convert them into a single object (you can undo this from the same sub-menu, choosing Ungroup instead).
Next, drag both the headline and the body text frames beneath so they sit underneath your image (select both, then unlock them and finally move them into position). You now have space left over beneath the text, so select the body text frame to click and drag the bottom of the frame down to fill the space. You’ll end up with room with more text to fill too.
Add more pages
Once you’ve filled your first page, move on to the next. Each template can support multiple page layouts, and our newsletter is no exception. Choose Page>Insert. You can insert one or more pages after the current page and choose different master pages for both left and rightfacing pages. For the purposes of producing a four-page newsletter, insert 3 pages, choosing InnerPageLeft and InnerPageRight as your page templates. Click OK.
Three new pages will be created using the layouts you specified, ready for you to populate them with content. This is all very straightforward, but only if you’re happy to work within the confines of the newsletter template itself. In reality, you’ll want to make changes to this layout following the frame tweaks we’ve discussed, or look to make bigger changes by designing pages yourself – the walkthrough (opposite) reveals how to create text and image frames from scratch.
Once you’ve started to master page design, you’ll want to incorporate those layouts in your own custom templates. The box (below) reveals how to build a template using a series of master pages, which are used to pre-populate pages with non-editable content.
Share your creation
Your work is complete, and you’re ready to print a physical copy or export it as a PDF to share digitally. The best way to do this is via File>Print Preview or File>Output Preview (for PDFs). A Preflight Verifier window will pop up listing all known errors – including those frames where there’s too much text to fit. Click an item to jump to it in the document, see the problem and correct it if necessary, then click Check again.
Alternatively, click Ignore Errors to see how the document will look – you’ll see various additional options depending on whether you’re printing or exporting to PDF – and finally click Print or Export… to complete the job.