[scribus] Master pages not working as expected (Gregory Pittman)

[Mark Cornwell]

>You may have to submit a bug with an attached document, since I'm not sure
what you're doing. One mistake people make is to put a frame in a Master
Page, then try to add content in their document, but you cannot edit content
except in Master Page mode, in which case all of the instances of that
Master Page are changed.
>
>Something you can do is to make your frames in some sort of layout, in
regular editing mode, then select them all (hold down Shift while you click
them one by one), copy them (Ctrl+C), then paste (Ctrl+V) on some other
page, in which case each frame will have the same coordinates as it had on
the page you copied from.
>
>Greg

Greg, thanks, I carried on researching after sending the enquiry. You're
right I was making that "mistake" - I had understood a master page to
function like master pages in other tools: you can design one with graphics
(e.g. logo to be on all pages) but when you design a "holding space" on the
page you can then subsequently fill it in a "real" page. Master pages are
templates in most products but it seems in Scribus they are little more than
things that you can trace your actual design over. There's little point in
doing that if one can't "snap to shape". The whole point of using a master
is to ensure that things are positioned exactly each time.

The alternative of a scrapbook is also not ideal because you can't scrapbook
a "whole page" as I understand it. If one could that might be a fair
workaround.

Your suggestion for making (effectively) blank pages in the book and
copy/pasting is sort of what I had anticipated Master Pages would be - but
without the copy/paste.

It seems the design of Scribus in this regard is far from ideal.

Thanks for helping me understand it.

Mark