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3.3 Preference Panels
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The preference panels are the heart of changing the default behaviors of Scribus and give the user considerable flexibilty in setting document defaults. Scribus' preferences are kept in a hidden directory .scribus. Within the directory is a .scribus.rc file and a scribusfont.rc file which preserves your font preferences. This file is stored in XML format, so you can inspect its contents with a text editor. The need for this has been greatly reduced in the lastest versions.
General Tab You can change the default theme with Scribus to include themes like Liquid or the new themes based on the KDE plug-ins. You can also tune the look of your Qt programs separately with qtconfig from the command line. Simply open a console window and type
qtconfig
The panels are pretty self explanatory. I would advise not increasing the font size above 12 points, as some buttons in Scribus menus might be obscured. In this example, the fonts have been changed to True Type fonts at 12 points and the latest Mostfet Liquid theme has been applied.Within these 7 tabs, you can change many of the defaults for Scribus, many of which can be changed or overridden in with a menu or right click context menu on an object while editing or in the measurements palette.
Mouse settings -If you have a wheel mouse, one of the nice defaults of Scribus is using this to scroll through a document. Wheel jump changes the default distance with each toggle of the mouse wheel. Grab Radius defines how much distance is allowed to select an object. Smaller numbers mean more precise, but sometimes more difficult selection of smaller objects.
Looking at this panel, you also can click on the keyboard shortcuts button and change the default keys for many menu functions and actions.
Typographics - Here you can change options for typographic features including subscript, superscript, automatic line spacing and scaling of small capitals.
Tools
In the Tools tab you can change the defaults for many common tasks and tools: font, size and color, text frame defaults, image frame defaults and zoom defaults. Most all of these can be overridden or changed with the Frame -> Modify from the right click menu when selecting an object.
Recently, added is polygon objects. You can make stars, triangles and convex polygons with intuitive controls. You can also apply gradient colors to all of these shapes within the measurements panel. This screen capture shows the liquid theme from Mosfet.
Scrapbook With scrapbooks, you can right button drag and drop frequently used items, including pictures, images and text files for quick placement. Scrapbooks can be saved with a file or independently of a document, as a separate scrapbook which can be loaded use with many different documents. Separate scrapbooks are kept with a .scs designation. This panel sets the defaults for the thumbnail size in the scrapbook palette and if scrapbooks should be saved with the file or if you would rather save them as individual scrapbooks.
Display This panel sets the defaults and options for margin colors, frame display, page background and you have the option to display unprintable areas in the selected margin color. You can also enable page side by side or also known in DTP lingo as "reader spreads"
This panel also enables PDF 1.4 (Acrobat 5+) transparency features added in 0.9.5. The default is disabled. For more info on PDF look at PDF Export and PDF/X-3.
Updated 03:03:2003
Edit Menu § Contents § Style Menus Menu