[scribus] [Newbie] How to align text boxes and image boxes

[Gregory Pittman]

On 12/30/2010 05:56 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Dec 2010 10:43:27 -0800
> Todd Cary<todd at aristesoftware.com>  dijo:
>
>> Could someone point me to a source/document that can help me
>> align text boxes so that I can have a result like
>>
>> http://www.petalumavalleyrotary.org/viewpoints/20101110/viewpoint_20101110.html
>>
>> In other words, I have the header image followed by the link
>> section, etc..  In the HTML version, the right and left margins
>> align and the sections join without gaps.
>>
>> Can this be done?
>
> Others may have different suggestions, because there are lots of ways
> to do things in Scribus. I would do it with layers.
>
> First I would put the pale pumpkin colored background on the bottom
> layer, flooding the entire page.
>
> On the second layer I would create a frame with the bottom pale orange
> color, then the brown color overlapping the top of the pale orange, then
> the medium brown color overlapping again, and finally the blue color,
> again, overlapping. Then I would add the frame for the sunset,
> overlapping again. By overlapping you avoid gaps. And last, I would
> place the Rotary logo.
>
> On the third layer I would create one text frame the same width as all
> the color frames on the second layer. I would set the inside to offset
> the text a few points so there will be a bit of margin. I would place
> all the text in this text frame and use text formatting to center the
> parts that are centered, color the parts that are not black, and so on.
>
> Note that there are layers and there are also stacking orders of the
> elements on a layer. I used three layers just because it makes it
> easier to work on one part of the design at a time. On the second layer
> I used stacking to overlap the color frames on top of each other to
> avoid gaps.

Use layers when you need layers. You have to consider what advantages 
that layers give you for a given project:

* you can only work on one layer at a time, which means you won't mess 
up anything on some other layer.

* you can make an entire layer visible or invisible, to export with your 
PDF (the default), or not. Thus a single Scribus document might generate 
a number of versions of PDFs, depending on which layers you export. 
Sometimes just turning off the visibility temporarily can make it easier 
to focus on what is visible.

* you can move an entire layer and its contents up or down the stack of 
layers.

If you're doing a simple document like a newsletter, with text and some 
graphics/images, it may not make much sense to make more than one layer. 
Even so, if you decide later to create another layer or two, you can 
easily move any content you already have to some new layer.

Greg