Preferences and Document Setup
From Scribus Documentation Project
Customizing Scribus
File >Preferences and File > Document Setup are closely related, though not identical, since there are some settings unique to Preferences, and one (“Document Information”) unique to Document Setup.
Preferences are either application wide settings, or those that will be used for future documents. Therefore, if you are creating a document at the time, any changes in Preferences will not take effect until you create a new document. Document Setup does the opposite, affecting the current document, but does not make permanent changes for the next time you use Scribus.
If you find yourself wondering why a particular font comes up when you make a text frame, or certain colors are used for a new shape, the answer to that, and the means to change these behaviours is found in this chapter.
This chapter will mainly focus on Preferences, but will point out differences when any exist for Document Settings.
Opening Preferences
You can find Preferences in the Main Menu: File > Preferences. Similarly, there is File > Document Setup.
Here are the categories in Preferences:
- General
- Document
- Guides
- Typography
- Tools
- Hyphenator
- Fonts
- Preflight Verifier
- Color Management
- PDF Export
- Document Item Attributes
- Table of Contents and Indexes
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Display
- External Tools
- Miscellaneous
- Plugins
- Short Words
- Scripter
In the Preferences, as well as in the Document Setup dialogs, there's a row of buttons at the bottom that are visible in all categories, "Save", "OK" and "Cancel", "OK" and "Cancel" being self-explanatory. "Save" lets you save the settings of a document or Scribus for use on another system or for backup purposes. For example, to use this feature, you might click on "Save" and enter the filename scribus13.rc. If you later want to use or reuse those settings, close Scribus, enter the directory ~/.scribus (in Windows this can be found in \Documents and Settings\UserName\.scribus), rename the file scribus13.rc, for instance to scribus13.rc.bak, then copy your saved scribus13.rc file to this directory. Scribus will now use the new settings as default.
In the Document Setup, there is a fourth button called "Defaults". If you click on it, the current document will load the settings from the Preferences.
We'll now go through different tabs one by one in the rest of this chapter.
General
“Language” applies to the language used in various menus and dialogs in Scribus. This will change immediately when you click Ok.
“Theme” affects the way Scribus looks and, to some degree, works on your system. It's dependent on the way Qt (the UI toolkit that's used for creating Scribus) is configured for your system. For Windows users, only Windows themes are available, for Linux user only the themes from Qt for Linux etc.
“Font Size (Menus)”, “Font Size (Palettes)”, “Wheel Jump” are more or less self-explanatory.
“Recent Documents” adjusts the number of Documents to choose from with File > Open Recent.
“Paths” sets the default directories for various Scribus needs – documents, ICC Profiles (will only be possible if your version is compiled to use these), Scripts if you have Python installed on your system, and document templates. If none of these are set there are default locations, depending on where Scribus is installed on your system. An additional path for ICC profiles can only be set if no document is open.
There is no General category in Document Setup.
Document
“Document Layout” choices are “Single Page”, “Double Sided”, “3-Fold”, and “4-Fold”. It's important to realize that for each of these layouts, you are working with individual sheets, so that when you export to PDF or print from Scribus, the 4-fold layout will display or print as four separate pages. One purpose is to have these layouts side-by-side in your workspace so that you can see how it will look in a book or some other form. Another is that with a double sided layout, for example, you will have left pages and right pages, with the various margins perhaps being different for these two, and if you use master pages, there will likely be left and right master pages.
“Page Size” allows choosing from a wide array of standard formats and also custom sizes. If you are changing your page size with Document Setup while you are working on a document, you will need to check “Apply Size Setting to All Pages” to change already existing pages. Also in this block you can choose portrait or landscape orientation, and the units of display for your page (Points, Millimeters, Inches, Picas, and Ciceros). If you change the settings for width or height of the page, the format will automatically change to “Custom”.
“Margin Guides” varies according to the document layout.
- With a single page layout, you cannot choose a preset layout, and your margin guides are left, right, top, and bottom.
- With double sided, 3- and 4-fold layouts, you can choose for a preset layout such as Gutenberg, Magazine, Fibonacci, Golden Mean, and Nine Parts. In any of the multipage layouts, left and right become inside and outside margins, since for example whether the inside is on the left depends on which page it is. Middle pages have both left and right margins the same.
- Printer margins will allow you to set guides according to the published margins for printers on your system.
- If you choose to Autosave, you can set the interval for these.
You can also set the number of levels of Undo/Redo. This option is not present in Document Setup.
Document Information
This is present only in Document Setup. It allows the entry of some various metadata about your document, which will be saved with the file.
In the "Document" tab, the first three fields can contain information that can be read by PDF viewers and specialized indexing software. On the screenshot below you see how Adobe Reader 7 displays the inserted data in the Dialog File > Document Properties.
The field "Description" and all the other fields in the second tab are a subset of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMI).ENDNOTE
Below is a list of the DMCI's definitions ENDNOTE of the metadata:
- "Description": "An account of the resource. Description may include but is not limited to: an abstract, a table of contents, a graphical representation, or a free-text account of the resource."
- "Publisher": "An entity responsible for making the resource available. Examples of a Publisher include a person, an organization, or a service. Typically, the name of a Publisher should be used to indicate the entity."
- "Contributors": "An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource. Examples of a Contributor include a person, an organization, or a service. Typically, the name of a Contributor should be used to indicate the entity."
- "Date": "A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource. Date may be used to express temporal information at any level of granularity. Recommended best practice is to use an encoding scheme, such as the W3CDTF profile of ISO 8601 (W3CDTF)."
- "Type": "The nature or genre of the resource. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary such as the DCMI Type Vocabulary (DCMITYPE). To describe the file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource, use the Format element."
- "Format": "The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource. Examples of dimensions include size and duration. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary such as the list of Internet Media Types (MIME)."
- "Identifier": "An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context. Recommended best practice is to identify the resource by means of a string conforming to a formal identification system."
- "Source": "The resource from which the described resource is derived. The described resource may be derived from the related resource in whole or in part. Recommended best practice is to identify the related resource by means of a string conforming to a formal identification system."
- "Language": "A language of the resource. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary such as RFC 3066." ENDNOTE
- "Relation": "A related resource. Recommended best practice is to identify the related resource by means of a string conforming to a formal identification system."
- "Coverage": "The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant. Spatial topic may be a named place or a location specified by its geographic coordinates. Temporal period may be a named period, date, or date range. A jurisdiction may be a named administrative entity or a geographic place to which the resource applies. Recommended best practice is to use a controlled vocabulary such as the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN). Where appropriate, named places or time periods can be used in preference to numeric identifiers such as sets of coordinates or date ranges."
- "Rights": "Information about rights held in and over the resource. Typically, rights information includes a statement about various property rights associated with the resource, including intellectual property rights."
Guides
In “Common Settings”, “Placing in Documents” allows for guides to be covered up by page content (Background) or show as if on top (Foreground). “Snapping Distances” applies when Page > Snap to Grid or Page > Snap to Guides are selected. “Grab Radius” determines the size of the area in which you can select object handles.
“Show Guides”, “Show Grid”, “Show Baseline Grid”, and “Show Margins” are all features that can also be selected and deselected from the menu (under View). These allow your choice for default behaviour, and for changing spacing and colors for these various tools. The baseline grid is used to align to baseline for text. See Working with Text for more about this.
The Grid consists of two parts, the Major and the Minor Grid. You can't switch them on or off independently, but you can change the color and the space between the grid lines separately. If you don't want to see one of the grids, set its color to the page color, which will be white in most cases. Alternatively, you could set the distance between lines at or larger than the longest page dimension.
If you change these settings in Document Setup, you will find that they will be present for the Document you have saved with those features every time it is opened, regardless of the settings in Preferences.
Typography
Here is where we set the default behaviour for placement and sizing of subscript, superscript, underline, and strikethrough. Also, the relative size of small caps is set here. When you change font size in the Text tab of the Properties Palette or in the Story Editor, there is an automatic change in line spacing – “Automatic Line Spacing” set at 20% will make Line Spacing 120% of the font size. For example, a font size of 10pts will have a line spacing of 12pts if automatic line spacing is used.
Tools
Here we have a number of subcategory settings for the default behaviours.
- “Text Frame Properties”: Font (type), size, text tolor, and text stroke apply to the text itself (text stroke is the outline or shadow if selected). “Fill Color” and “Stroke Color” apply to the text frame: its fill and line colors. Each color has an adjustable saturation – shading. We can also set a default tab fill character and default tab interval (when tabs are used automatically rather than set separately in the Shape tab of the Properties Palette) – see Working with TextENDNOTE and Working with Styles.ENDNOTE Finally, we can set a default number of columns and the gap between them. The text field at the bottom of the dialog displays a preview of the text properties.
- “Picture Frame Properties” begins with allowing for free scaling or “Scale Picture to Frame Size” when an image is loaded, with subsettings. As with text frames, fill color and shading can be selected. If the image has an embedded clipping path this can be used. “On Screen Preview” applies only to the appearance of images onscreen while using Scribus, not to resolution when printing or exporting to PDF. See Working With Images.ENDNOTE
- “Shape Drawing Properties”, just as for text and picture frames, allows for default colors and saturation, and in addition the line style and line width. These settings also apply to polygons.
- “Polygon Drawing Properties” shows the same settings we see when Polygon > Properties is brought up on screen from the toolbar, so that default settings can be made. See Working With Shapes and Polygons.ENDNOTE
- “Line Drawing Properties”, as one could anticipate, adjust default color, shading, line style, line width, and presence or absence of arrows at each end. See Working With Shapes and Polygons.ENDNOTE
- “Magnification Level Defaults” has to do with behavior when the magnification tool is selected (left click larger, right click smaller), and also when increase or decrease magnification icons are clicked at the bottom of the screen. See Viewing Options.ENDNOTE
Hyphenator
The settings presented here are straightforward in themselves, however may require some experimenting to understand fully. Hyphenation is not activated by default. See Hyphenation.ENDNOTE
Fonts
“Available Fonts” shows you the fonts which Scribus located when it started up. You can deselect any you do not want to use to shorten the number of choices in various dialogs.
“Font Substitutions” allows for automatic use of a different font when a file requests one not on your system. This is also useful when, as can happen, the name of a font changes in some way.
“Additional Paths” will allow Scribus to find fonts in non-standard locations on your system. If you know you have fonts that Scribus is not finding, this may be your solution.
For more information see Font Preview and Font Management.ENDNOTE
Preflight Verifier
This dialog has several modes (Profiles), perhaps not immediately apparent. PostScript applies to either printing directly from Scribus or saving to a file from the Print dialog. When Exporting to PDF, there are options for PDF 1.3, PDF 1.4, PDF 1.5, and PDF X-3 versions, and each will have its own collection of behaviours when the Preflight Verifier runs. At the bottom, one or more of these Profiles can be removed, or added back later (Add Profile).
Select Ignore all errors at your own peril.
Note that you can check for items which may not apply to the output, for example, transparency in PDF 1.3, where this is not supported. Furthermore, you can check for things which are supported, such as transparency in PDF 1.4. Check for placed PDF Files is to serve as a reminder that PDFs incorporated into Scribus will be rasterized (converted to a bitmap), not that this will fail in an absolute sense.
For more information see The Preflight Verifier.ENDNOTE
Color Management
Generally speaking, you should activate color management if you can, even though some printers do not want color management active. Read the various tooltips on these settings for help. Also check the Colors and Color Management chapter.ENDNOTE
PDF Export
These are the various settings for defaults when you click the Save as PDF... icon, or File > Export > Save as PDF... from the Menu.
For more information see the section PDF Export.ENDNOTE
Document Item Attributes
This panel allows to add user defined attributes to document items. Currently it's only used for the generation of a table of contents, but users can add arbitrary metadata here (eg. "author", "date", "licence"...)
You only define the keys (names) of the attributes here. The values are defined via the corresponding action in the context menu of each item.
Table of Contents and Indexes
This defines how a table of contents is assembled from individual document items. The items which make up section headings must be marked with specific attributes.
The “Index” pane is a placeholder for a future extension of Scribus.
For more information see Creating a Table of Contents.ENDNOTE
Sections
This is present only in the Document Setup. It allows to divide the document into different sections with each having their own numbering scheme for page numbers (eg. i, ii, iii,..., ix for the preface, 1, 2, 3,... for the main text) See Page Numbering.ENDNOTE
Keyboard Shortcuts
A number of shortcuts are built into Scribus, which may be altered and others added as desired. At the bottom, entire collections of shortcuts can be exported or imported. See Keyboard Shortcuts.ENDNOTE
There is no Keyboard Shortcuts category in Document Setup.
Display
“Page Display” allows for changing these various options, none of which affects the output from Scribus to printer or to PDF.
“Scratch Space” adjusts the space around your document, also usable for temporary placement of various objects. Such items will be saved in Scribus's native file format, but will not be printed or exported to PDF.
“Gaps between Pages” like these other settings, only applies to applicable distances in the workspace.
“Adjust Display Size” is adjusted with a small visual for the ruler at the top of the workspace.
See also Viewing Options - There's More Than One Way to Look at a DocumentENDNOTE
There is no “Display” category in Document Setup.
External Tools
Here is where you can make sure that Scribus is finding your Ghostscript executable, or finds the desired one where more than one exists. Antialiasing only applies to the display, as does “Resolution”.
You may also choose which image processing software to use, such as GIMP, Krita or Cinepaint. When you choose Edit Image... from the context menu, the program indicated here is started. Note that you should insert "gimp-remote" on Linux/*nix and OS X and "gimp-win-remote" on Windows to prevent opening a new instance of GIMP each time you use the function from the context menu.
There is no “External Tools” category in Document Setup.
Miscellaneous
- “Always ask before fonts are replaced when loading” determines if Scribus will ask you whether fonts that are used in a document, but not installed on your system, should be replaced. Don't switch this off until you know what you're doing!
- “Preview of current Paragraph Styles when editing Styles” lets you switch the sample text in the paragraph style dialog on or off. This is recommended if your computer has a slow CPU or video card.
- The startup dialog normally comes up when you start Scribus, asking you to choose between “New Document”, “Open Existing Document”, or “Open Recent Document”.
- Lorem Ipsum allows you to bypass the “Sample Text” dialog and simply enter a standard Lorem Ipsum with the number of chosen paragraphs.
There is no “Miscellaneous” category in Document Setup.
Plugins
If you know which of these you will not be using, startup can be shortened by not loading various plugins.
There is no “Plugins” category in Document Setup.
Short Words
See Short Words.ENDNOTE
Scripter
See Using Scripts ENDNOTE













