The Scribus Workspace
From Scribus Documentation Project
The Layout of the Workspace
The Scribus workspace basically consists of five elements, the menu bar, the toolbar, The canvas and the status bar. These elements are supplemented by dialogs that can appear and disappear on the canvas. The Properties Palette is the most important dialog in Scribus.
- The menu bar, containing menus from File to Help.
Note: A potential source of confusion exists in 1.3.3.x and earlier versions of Scribus. There is a Menu item Style, which is simply an alternative way to individually apply some of the features described below. It can be easily confused with the concept of line and paragraph styles. For that reason we will ignore this menu in this manual. - The toolbar for important operations. It consists of four groups of buttons, from left to right: File Actions, Edit, Tools, PDF Forms.
- The scribus canvas consists of the document pages and the surrounding space, the scratch space. You can drag items with the mouse to the scratch space for later use. On the left and on top it shows rulers for precise measurement.
- The status bar. As you would expect, it shows the coordinates of the mouse pointer, and it also has a progress bar for longer operations like opening large files. On the left, you can set the unit for the rulers or choose another zoom level. You can also navigate in the document and between layers.
- The Properties Palette. It can be opened/closed by pressing F2.
Rearranging the Icons
“Out of the Box”, Scribus arranges its toolbar horizontally across the top of the screen. But you can change this at any time.
- New, Open, Save, Close, Print, Preflight Verifier, Export to PDF
- Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste
- Select, Insert Text Frame, Insert Image Frame, Insert Table, Insert Shape, Insert Polygon, Insert Line, Insert Bézier Curve, Insert Freehand Line; Rotate, Zoom, Edit Content, Story Editor, Link Text Frames, Unlink Text Frames, Measure, Copy Properties, Eyedropper
- Insert PDF Fields, Insert PDF Annotations
- Each of these groups, including the basic seven, has a faint dotted mark to its left, indicating its beginning. You can click on any this mark in any group and move it to any place on the canvas. If you click on the arrow beside the faint dotted mark, you can decide whether and where the button group will dock to and what the orientation of the group will be on canvas (horizontal or vertical).
If you dock it either on the left or right margin of the page, the group will appear vertically. If you move two groups and they don't quite line up together, you can right-click the group and select “Line Up”.
Another convenient feature of Scribus is the scratch space, the ability to define big areas on all sides of the active page area which you can use as a playpen. If you move the toolbars to the left, right or bottom and you have substantial scratch space defined in those areas, the icons will be displaced from your working area; you may find this inconvenient.

