[scribus] First Line Offsets

[ZASKE Martin]

I am making a book with 200+ pages and have just auto-created all pages
and all linked text-frames.

I set my baseline grid and defined my default style and main style for
the main text.


Now I noticed that for each text-frame the First Line Offset was
automatically set to Maximum Ascent. Which might be best for most users
but which I hate, because it creates rather random visual results,
depending on what happens to be written in the first line of text:

If my left page text frame starts with "ooooo" the text will end up
higher on the page than a right page text with "ahhhh".

Line Spacing might be a default for new text frames which would be more
intuitive for new users and would produce nicer results for all users
who are not using the baseline grid.

I have found no official way to set my preference (Baseline Grid) for
each new text frame nor for the automatically created text-frames for
new documents. I looked at preferences, item tools, text-tab and at
default styles etc.

I also found no way of manually fixing this, like selecting more than
one text-frame and change all First Line Offsets to Baseline Grid. (So I
opened the .sla file with a text editor and changed all FLOP="0" to
FLOP="3" and hoped that this was the right place to tweak.)



All our main text of the book is under one style, and there I have set
Align to Baseline Grid. I have tested that when the First Line Offset
for a text-frame is contradicting the Alignment and Distance setting for
the style of the first paragraph, then the style of the paragraph is
winning (luckily) over the setting of the text-frame.

So this is not a major problem for our book, just some mild weirdness
which takes time to figure out.


Generally I would love a new feature in Scribus, where I would select
several texts and change their text properties together. It is even
working for fill colours or line properties of a "Text Frame" and of a
"Shape" with one click when both are selected. So why can we not select
several texts and change their properties at once?


These are not complaints. We love Scribus. Just trying to work more
efficiently and to better understand this awesome tool.

How do other users handle this subject of First Line Offset or vertical
positionings? Everybody is using the baseline grid and the other
features are just bonus-stuff for huge-size headlines?

Martin




-- 
ZASKE Martin
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