In the last time, I worked a lot with the new Scribus 1.3.3.3 and also the CVS-version. During that, I discovered some useful tricks. Also the Scribus-guys on the mailing-list and on IRC helped me a lot.

1. The Hand-Tool

When a document ist zoomed and you can't see the whole document on the screen, you can use the space-bar to get a hand-tool which works similiar to the hand-tool in Acrobat Reader: Holding down the left mouse-key, you can scroll around the document.

Pressing the space-bar again brings you back to the standard-tool.

2. Alignment of stroked frames

When a frame is stroked, Scribus aligns it with the middle of the stroke-width to guide-lines, page-borders and so on. That's not what I want: I normaly need an alignment where the outer side of the frame, including the whole stroke-width, is used as snap-in for the guides.

There's a workaround for getting this behavior:

  1. Create your stroked frame with - for example - a stroke-width of 2 mm. Scribus will add the stroke-line centered to the frame's border.
  2. Create another frame without any stroke. Set it's height and width to the values of the stroked frames, adding the width of the stroke. For example: When your stroked frame has a height of 50 mm, a width of 20 mm and a stroke of 2 mm, set the new frame's height to 52 mm and it's width to 22 mm.
  3. Now align the two frames so that their upper right corners are overlying. In the example above: Set the non-stroked frame's X- and Y-positions to 0, then set the stroked-frames X- and Y-Positions both to 1.
  4. Group the two frames. The group will now aligned with its outer border to guide-lines etc. The frame with no stroke can be send to back.

3. Hiding the windows

There are a lot windows in Scribus: If you have opened the properties, the scrap-book, the layers and so on, you will not be able to see something from your document ...

Pressing F10 will hide all free flying windows. Pressing F10 again will bring them back. But - huh - not only the windows which were opend before, but all available windows will pop up on your document.

To avoid this, I changed the settings of my KDE-desktop: Under "Desktop/Window Behavior" I changed the setting for double-clicking the title of a window to "Shade". Now, with a double-click in the title-bar, the window is folded so that it is only as big as its title.

4. Scaling of images / image-frames

Create an image-frame and insert an image into it. Normaly, the image wouldn't have the perfect size for that frame. You have to scale the image. When using the mouse on the red frame-borders, just the frame is effected but not the image. Resizing an image in a frame can be done in various ways:

  1. In the property-window, under "Image", you can scale the image numerical. Either in absolut numbers or in percentages.
  2. On the same tab, there is an option "Scale to frame size". This will adjust the image to the proportion of the frame.
  3. When right-clicking on an image-frame, there is the opposite of what I wrote under 2.): "Adjust frame to image" will scale the frame so that the image fits perfect into it.

5. Opacity

Not only the fill-color of a frame, but also the stroke of a frame can get some opacity. With this feature it's possible to create border-frames for images or other content very quickly.