A Step-by-Step Beginner’s Guide to Using Scribus
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This is a thorough, step-by-step guide to navigating and using Scribus for the first time, written for version 1.4.8! It is intended to be user-friendly for folks with no prior design skills. While we are specifically guiding you through the process of formatting a novel in this program, it should be applicable for other forms of art as well, such as ‘zines.
If you want more abbreviated guides targeted at using specific tools and windows in Scribus, head back to our Scribus hub. (Note: those abbreviated guides are not available yet.)
If you want a guide to how to structure a completed novel before formatting it, then we’ll have information on that in our eBook guide hub. (Also not available yet. We are one person with an awful lot to do!)
Ready to begin? Okay! Get out your “graphic design is my passion” memes and let’s get started.
The first step is to install Scribus! We should have a working link to it both in the sidebar and right here; this is Scribus’ stable branch page. Click the sourceforge link that corresponds to your computer system and download it. Should be the green button that says something like “Download Latest Version scribus-1.4.8-systemtype.exe.” Customary reminder here to always be careful about what you download. Oh, and feel free to click around Scribus’ site for more information if you feel like it too.
Once you have it all set up on your computer, opening the program should greet you with this lovely blank canvas of possibilities;
Seem intimidating? Don’t worry, it’s more scared of you than you are of it.
Setting Up Your Document
Setting Up Your Document
So, this is the start window; unless you click “do not show this dialog box again,” it should be there every time you open Scribus. “Open Existing Document” and “Open Recent Document” should be pretty self-explanatory. There’s also a “New From Template” tab; you can look at those if you want some ideas of what can be done in Scribus, but in order to understand how Scribus constructs documents, we need to go over the “New Document” tab that the program is already on.
Let’s break it down into individual sections.
1. Layout Options
This is how many folded pages your layout will spread across. If you’re making something singular, like a business card, or a digital PDF that you don’t want a two page spread for, choose one. Two is necessary for print books, and it’s also my personal preference for digital PDFs. Three and four page spreads are generally for pamphlets and the like; some of you folks might choose these to make a real interesting ‘zine spread!
For the purposes of this demonstration, we’re choosing the two page spread.
2. Size Options
This is where you decide your page size. The “Size” category gives you a LOT of specific paper types you can size your pages to, but you can also just set custom sizes with the “Height” and “Width” category.
“Orientation” doesn’t matter too much if you’re specifying your own size. You can leave it on portrait. “First Page” is a little more important; if you’re making a print book, it should be set to “Right Page.” Since our books tend to be ebooks and we place the cover on the first page, we personally set it to “Left Page.”
Again, if you want to physically print, here’s a few more things to consider; firstly, your book’s final page count will be affected by page size, text spacing, and font size, and the final page count will affect any print costs. Secondly, your size options will be limited based on what your publishing platforms offer. Some typical industry sizes are 5×8 in, 5.5×8.5 in, and 6×9 in.
Consider measuring the books in your house to get a feel for the size that you prefer, and research your publishing platforms thoroughly!
Personally, we prefer 6x9. It’s a nice-feeling ratio to work within. If you aren’t physically printing anything, then you can make your page sizes anything you desire, but using standard physical book sizes can make it feel more . . . book-ish. Book-feeling. Book-essenced. You know what we mean.
If you end up hating your initial page size, don’t worry! This can be changed later in the Document Setup menu.
3. The “Margin Guides” Tab
The margin is the space between the edge of the page and the main body text. Some elements can go outside of the margins — like page number and titling — but margins generally help you see where your main text frames and images should go.
If you’re making for print, again, you have extra things to consider; the “Inner” margin should be slightly larger than the outer margin, to account for the way the page connects to the book spine; again, consult your publishing platform to see if they have any standards you need to follow.
Digital is still more free-form again. But when sizing digital PDFs, it does look nicer when you set your outer and inner margins to the same size.
And if you don’t like your initial sizing, margins can be also changed in the Document Setup menu later on. Standard margin ranges vary depending on page size. Feel free to experiment a little before settling on a size that feels good to you! You can even do crazy things like make large outer margins for note-taking, or large bottom margins to account for footnotes.
With our page size of 6x9, we prefer inner and outer margins of 0.65 in, and top and bottom margins of 0.5 in.
4. The “Bleed” Tab
This section is for setting up bleed. The bleed is a zone slightly outside of the margin of the paper. It’s there to give a printer space to account for natural movement of the paper during the printing process; basically, it leaves room for error. If you have a design or artwork that’s meant to take up the whole page, or meet the edge of the page, then extending the design into the bleed ensures that there are no weird, white unprinted edges in the final product.
If you’re making a PDF for purely online use, and/or you don’t have any design elements that meet the edge of the paper, then you can leave the bleed at 0.
If you do have design elements that meet the edge of the paper, and are going to have your project printed, then 0.125 in to 0.25 in is the standard range for bleed measurements; if you’re using a specific printing service, check and see if they have a preferred bleed range.
Like with the previous two sections, you can change your bleed size later if needed.
5. Other Options
This is where all the other miscellaneous set-up settings are placed. “Number of Pages” is how many you start out with (you can add more later,) and “Default Unit” is where all you non-Americans can switch over to metric units if you’d like. You can also use Picas or Points, but I think those units are just there for the really enthused typographers out there.
Lastly, do you see the little box that we put that big, red “X” over? DO NOT CLICK THAT. “Automatic Text Frames” is one of Scribus’ newer features, and in 1.4.8, it has the potential to produce the most annoying bug in this program.
What Automatic Text Frames is supposed to do is automatically produce a text frame to fill the margin of every new page you add to the document. In our experience, what it actually does is generate text frames out-of-bounds one document-length below the page you added. And if you don’t scroll down to delete or move the out-of-bounds frames back up to where they belong, then it really starts to slow down the program. The best part is that once you set up a document with Automatic Text Frames, you can’t undo it. You have to make a new document, or live with the bug. Fun!
It’s pretty easy to just copy-paste text frames from a different page onto the new pages you add, so not having this feature doesn’t bother us much. If the bug in this feature is fixed in the next update though, and we get the option to turn it off when needed, then it would be a good timesaver.
But for now; DO NOT CLICK THE BOX.
“But what are Columns and Gap for?” They’re size settings for if you click the little box THAT YOU DO NOT CLICK. This means you can ignore them! Meanwhile, “Show Document Settings After Creation” just makes sure that the Document Setup menu opens when you click the “OK” button. You don’t have to click it, but it’s harmless if you do.
Now here’s what our starting selections look like for our new project; depending on what you want to do, yours might look different.
And here’s what our blank project looks like once we click the OK button;
Glorious. Don’t forget to save your brand-new document! Just use the ctrl+s shortcut, or try the little blue-arrow-on-a-gray-box button in the tool bar up at the top. This document will save as a .sla file, which is a file type unique to Scribus; later, we’ll talk about exporting to other file types, like PNG or PDF.
Now we can get to the actual design work. First thing’s first; how can you have a story without text?
In order to add text to this document, you need a text frame. See that button in the toolbar that looks like a lined page with an “A” at the top? That lets you create text frames. You can also use “T” as a shortcut. Click and drag your mouse, and bam! First textbox down.
But it doesn’t look like we made it big enough to fill the margins. Hrmm!
Luckily, there are a few different ways to resize it. One is to select the text frame and then grab one of the red squares in the corners or on the sides. This lets you resize via dragging. Since we want to align this frame with the margins, though, there’s also a faster way we can resize this. If you click the “Windows” tab, one of the options near the bottom of the dropbox is “Align and Distribute.” Clicking that brings up a mini window with settings that can be used to move elements around on the page.
Right now, we’ll just focus on the “Align” tab. Make sure you have your text frame selected. Since we want to make the frame fill the whole margin area, set the “Relative To” option to “Margins,” and then “Align Sides By” to “Resizing.” Then just click the little buttons below until you’ve figured out which ones will stretch it to the margins (hint; don’t use the ones with the blue square. If you mess up, use the ctrl+z “Undo” shortcut.)
When you’ve done that it should look like this!
Click on the frame, ctrl+c, click on the next page, ctrl+v, and boom. You now know how to quickly copy a new text frame onto a page.
Now, there’s a few different ways to add text to this frame. If you double-click the frame, you can directly type or paste text inside. But in order to do fine, individual-line style detail, we need to bring up the text editor window. The fastest way to do this is to ctrl+t while the text frame is selected. You could also right-click the frame and select “Edit Text” from the dropdown that shows up, or click the text editor button up at the top.
This is a good time to familiarize yourself with the inside of this window, because you’re going to be seeing it a lot. Let’s break this one down too.
1. This Is Where You Type In Words
Or copy-paste Words. Or import words from an outside document — you can do that by clicking “File” and then “Load From File” from the dropdown, by the way. Either way, once you have your text in the program, then you can go about altering it as you please. One of the main alterations you can make to the text is changing the style it’s in. This is done with . . .
2. Paragraph Styles
This little sidebar shows what styles are applied to each paragraph of text. What’s a paragraph style? It’s like a text style in word processors, if you’re familiar with those. Paragraph styles let you change the look of your text very quickly. Instead of having to individually set things like text size, color, and font choice, you can create styles that have all of those customizations already set, and apply it to your text en masse. You can make individual styles for base text, headers, subheaders, footnotes, and anything else your project needs.
You might have noticed that all of the text in our example is labeled as “No Style.” That’s because we haven’t applied any styles to them yet; and since this document doesn’t actually have any styles beyond Default Paragraph Style, we’re going to have to hold off on styling these paragraphs until later in the tutorial.
But for later reference, do you see those two little arrows to the left of the circle labeled “4?” Remember those. Those arrows summon a dropdown menu that allows you to quickly apply paragraph styles to all highlighted paragraphs.
3. Font Settings
On the off chance that you do need to apply some individual, non-style text adjustments, you do have some options inside the editor itself. This part of the settings lets you change font, font size, and also allows you to change the height or width of the font. The latter comes in surprisingly useful sometimes!
4. Text Alignment
Just like in word processors, you can change text alignment in Scribus. Your options are left-aligned, center-aligned, right-aligned, and two slightly-different flavors of justified alignment.
5. All The Rest
These little buttons do a lot of niche things. A quick summary of what can be found here; underlining, subscript, superscript, all caps, small caps, strikeout, outlined text, and text drop shadows. The “AV” percentage thing is for increasing or decreasing the space between letters. The percentage bars labeled “black” are for text color.
By now, you might be scratching your head wondering where the option to bold or italicize text is. That is, strangely enough handled in the same place where you change fonts up in Font Settings. It is for this reason that we’re going to advise you to use TrueType fonts.
Like most programs, Scribus draws from all the font options already installed on your computer. If you can’t seem to find a font that you’re happy with, we have a separate tutorial on finding safe, handsome-lookin’ freeware fonts over here. TrueType fonts with individual files for each variation of the font (bold, italic, etc) are a better bet with Scribus than OpenType files. If you use an OpenType, you might only end up with the option for the basic roman version of the font listed in the dropdown, meaning that you can’t access bold or italics for that font.
When you make a change to your text in the text editor, remember to save frequently. You can do this with ctrl+s. And now that you have a vague idea of how this window works, we’re going to put down the actual text we’re going to use for our project.
We do recommend copy-pasting text here instead of directly importing files. Do you organize your stories into separate text documents for each chapter? If not, trust me, figuring out how to organize your novel into separate documents for the sake of importation won’t be worth it. It also might mangle certain characters, such as the apostrophe; unless you have the right plugin installed, Scribus seems to only accept .txt imports, and those are a little limited in the characters they can understand.
It’s not very pretty right now, but what’s probably more concerning is the fact that it just seems to end at the end of the textbox. Like this;
The little red square with the X inside of it at the end of the frame is there to tell you that more text is inside the box than it can render.
Every individual text frame is limited by the space it takes up. It can only show as much text as can fit in that space. Since it would be pretty inconvenient to have to chop up your text to make it fit into every frame individually — especially since styling the text will change the amount of space it takes up — Scribus has a way to let different frames share the same text.
Remember that second empty frame we copied onto the next page? Select the frame with text. Then you can either click “n” on your keyboard, or select the circled button in the menu at the top. After that, you click the empty frame, and watch the text transfer. Remember that the first frame you click is going to become the one that displays text first and overflows into the next, so make sure you link them in the right order. If you go into the “View” dropdown menu at the top and click “View Text Chain,” you can see which boxes are linked, and in what direction the link flows. “View” is also generally useful for letting you see (or ignore) other document elements, so feel free to play around with it and see what everything does.
But back to our text frames. Now that these two frames are linked, you can use either one to edit the main text inside.
Next to the text frame linking button, there’s also a button for unlinking text frames if you need. It works the same way. Click one of the text frames you want to unlink, click the button, then click the other frame.
Now, you could go about generating and linking more text frames until all of the text is visible. We’re going to hold off on that. These two pages are enough visualization to help us wrap our heads around the other ways to change how our text is displayed on the page. Text styles are coming soon, we promise, but first we want to create a grid for the text to structure itself on.
You know the blue lines on school-grade lined paper? Our guidelines are going to be something like that; they’ll be there to give our text something consistent to follow, so that all our lines of text neatly match up with one another across different pages and between text frames. And to make them, we’re finally bringing up the Document Setup menu. Navigate over to “File” and select the “Document Setup” option from the menu. In the window that pops up, we want to investigate the “Guides” section.
There are multiple things you can mess around with here. You can hover over these options, and Scribus will give you a box explaining what they do.
Down at the bottom are the options we actually need right now. “Page Grid” can be useful if you have multi-column setups or if you’re making something more visual, like a magazine. At the moment, what we want is “Baseline Grid,” since that will help us determine where our text goes.
Turn on “Show Baseline Grid.” Now we can edit these settings a bit. “Color” is just what color the grid lines are displayed with in-program. These grid lines are not going to carry over into the finished PDF, so you can just set them to whatever color is easiest for you to see and work with. Under “Baseline Settings,” “Baseline Grid” is the one that will create and size the guidelines. The point size you want your lines to be is going to vary based on a lot of factors. The main ones are what size your page already is, what size you want your text to be, and how much space you want between lines of text. You can try different sizes to get a feel for what lines up nicely on the page.
Since we’re familiar with the page size we’re already using, we’re setting ours to 18 pt*, which fits nicely between the margins and gives the font we plan to use a little breathing room.
“Baseline Offset” is there as a supplementary feature for your sizing. It offsets the start of the grid at the top of the page by a set point size, meaning that you can push the lines down a little to make them line up better with your margins if you want. When you play around with the size, try playing around with this too. Once you have the settings you want, click “Apply” to see them appear on the document.
Now that we’ve set up our grid, you can see in the background that our text . . . is not actually aligning to the grid! What gives? Well, just having the grid there isn’t enough to make text align to it. It’s finally time to pull out the paragraph styles!
For this window, you need to go into the “Edit” dropdown menu and select “Styles.” Pressing F3 will also bring up the same window.
You can see that our current selected style is “Default Character Style,” and we are sitting in the “Character Style” tab.
Anything you apply to the default paragraph style will apply to other styles you make by default, unless that style is set to follow a different style OR if that element of the style does not match the element you are applying a change to. For instance, if the default font size is 11pt, and we set a different style to 32pt, that will not change if we change the default style to 12pt. Styles based on Default that also use 11 pt font WILL change to 12 pt when we make that change though. Because of this function, we recommend not using the default character style as a style directly applied to a document, but instead a base for quickly editing multiple similar styles at a time.
This is all a little confusing at first, but play around with it on a few documents and you'll get the hang of it.
In any case, you can see that our No Style lines all conform to the default style when we set it to a new font (IM Fell Great Primer) and click “Apply.”
This change doesn’t apply to any other styles in our document, because it’s currently our only style. If we click “New” and select “Paragraph Style,” we can rectify that; up at the top, we can name our new style. Looking down at the font for this new style, we can see that it inherited the IM Fell Great Primer font from our default style.
In order to keep our Basic Style consistent with Default Paragraph Style, we’re going to switch back to Default Paragraph to edit both of them.
Luckily, all of the options on the “Character Style” tab line up with the same options we reviewed back when we were laying out the text editor, so we don’t need to go over it again! It’s the “Properties” tab that really needs a dissection here.
0. “Based On:” Style Selector
We forgot to circle this one, but see the “Based On:” selection below the tab changers and above the numbered circles we made? That's how you can change what style your current style follows. We're currently on the Default Style, so this option is grayed out because default styles can't be based off of other styles.
It's worth noting here that the Default Style cannot be deleted, and this means that another one of Scribus' glitches involves Default Styles. When you import styles from another docment, some weird stuff happens if you end up with two Default Styles. As a result, we recommend copying styles from another document by hand rather than importing; it's a pain, but it's better than corrupting your style list.
1. Distances & Alignment
Here’s where we can line up our text with the baseline grid guidelines we’ve just generated! See that tab marked “Fixed Linespacing?” Change that option to “Align to Baseline Grid.” Once we click “Apply,” all our text should be spaced according to the rows set up in our grid.
The options directly beneath allow us to create spaces between paragraphs. Along with indentation, this can help readers distinguish each paragraph individually. But due to the baseline gride spacing we’re using for this project, adjusting the space between paragraphs by even a fraction of a point size would create massive gaps between every paragraph. Not an attractive look. Better to just adjust the baseline grid to adjust the spacing, in this case.
Depending on what baseline grid set-up you’re using for your work, or if you decide to swear off the grid entirely, you might find this option more useful. You can also change the alignment of your text with the five familiar-looking buttons at the bottom of this box.
2. Optical Margins
Optical margin alignment allows you to show certain kinds of punctuation (quotation marks, hyphens, bullets points) outside the normal text area. This feature can be useful for balancing narrow, centered columns of text, such as in a ‘zine. It’s not too useful for novels. We have indents, and our text rows are long enough not to need a minute adjustment like that.
3. Drop Caps
We’ve briefly reviewed what drop caps are in our fonts tutorial, but a quick recap is that drop caps are those fancy, extra-big letters you sometimes see at the beginning of a chapter. Like the one we added to this paragraph! Drop caps don’t work for every style of story. For the sake of demonstration (and our own aesthetic sensibilities), these are going into this project. Unlike our other changes, we’re going to create a separate style just for holding the drop cap property; one without indents, closer to the default style. If we added drop caps to our default or basic style, then they would appear in EVERY basic paragraph instead of just the section beginning. We don’t want that.
One feature that would elevate the drop caps option on Scribus would be to let us set a font just for the drop caps. Using the same text font as the rest of the paragraph for this feature isn’t as striking as a good display font. But, we can at least change the individual letter’s font in the editor. It’s not convenient, but it is something.
Another good feature would be letting the dropcap include quotation marks as well as the initial letter. This would be helpful when a chapter starts with dialogue. Just having a big pair of quotation marks isn’t ideal. Neither is removing the quotation marks entirely, which is the “workaround” we used for a while. We don’t have an actual elegant workaround to this yet, aside from dropping in a tiny textbox or textwrap image with a quotation mark addition in it. Oh well. We’re working on it!
4. Advanced Settings
This is all about the spacing within a line. It mostly just applies to justified text; essentially, “Min Space Width” determines how thin you want spaces between words to be able to go. “Glyph Extension” determines whether you let the program widen or unwiden characters in the same way that it can adjust spacing, and to what degree.
If you’ve chosen a decent font, you probably won’t need these applied to any paragraph style wholesale. But you might need to adjust spacing of individual paragraphs to prevent widowed and orphaned lines. We'll talk about those in a different tutorial.
5. Tabulators & Indentations
This is how we give a style the ability to indent! For quick references; basic textual paragraphs should have the first line indented, because it helps readers to see where paragraphs begin and end. Paragraphs that start off a chapter — regardless of if they have drop caps or not — should not indent, because the first paragraph looks cleaner without one. So, we add an indent not to our Default style that edits everything, but to our Basic style.
You can set first line indentations at A, left whole-paragraph indentations at B, and right whole-paragraph indentations at C. You can also set indentations with the ruler right above, but it’s easier and more precise to just type in a number.
For our project, we’re setting our indentation at 0.35 in. An inch is probably as big as you want to go with an indentation. Personally, we find that anything over 0.5 in feels too big.
Aside from all these changes, we’ve also created a paragraph style just for paragraphs that are entirely in italics. You might not need this for your document, but ours does have a couple standalone lines in italics, and it’s much easier to change a paragraph style than to apply italics to text. Scribus is weird like that. You’ll see what we mean when we get to the part where we show you italics in the first place.
Remember to click “Apply” after you make your changes to every style. When we look back at our text, the only changes we can see right now are the adjustments we did to the default style.
We need to go into the text frames to apply our styles to each paragraph. Time to bring up the text editor again.
In the editor, the first thing we want to do is ctrl+a to select all of the text. Do you remember those tiny arrows by the text alignment buttons that we pointed out earlier? Clicking those brings up a dropdown menu. Selecting any style from this list will apply it to either the current paragraph your cursor is inside of, or all paragraphs highlighted.
Using this, we can apply our basic style across the whole text. Nifty! Once you have this style change applied, press ctrl+u or click that little button that looks like a paper with a green arrow pointing down on it. This will show us what our updated text looks like.
If we need to make a smaller change, we can also click the style sidebar directly. This lets us change one paragraph at a time. With this, we can demonstrate how our drop cap looks on the page.
The larger your project is, the more likely it is that it’s going to need a lot of styles. This might make the style dropdowns a little more awkward to navigate, but trust us, it’s still faster than navigating the font dropdown. Here’s an example of a document with more styles applied to it;
While the styles we’ve made here are very nice, we’re actually going to copy the styles from our Shadow Herald document. Keeping stylistic consistency in a book series is very important; if we weren't making this new document for demonstration purposes, then we would have saved a clone of our Shadow Herald and used that as the base for this one, as it already has all of the styles and master pages we need on it. In theory, the “Import" option exists for this. But since Import has some glitches, we'll have to wait for a later update of Scribus to put it to proper use.
For now, you're probably wondering what a master page is. Well . . .
And here’s where we cut off for now, because we’re still working on the rest of this guide! See ya when we next update. We’re gonna teach you all sorts of fun things to do with this program. Just very, very slowly.