Viewing Options - There's More Than One Way to Look at a Document
From Scribus Documentation Project
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Document Windows
If you have opened more than one document, you can switch between them by using the Windows menu. All open documents are listed at the end of the menu. This method isn't that useful if you want to switch faster between open files. In this case, you can either tile or cascade the document windows via Windows > Cascade or Windows > Tile:
As you will learn by reading this manual, Scribus is highly configurable, and this is also true for viewing options. The most relevant tab in the Preferences and Document Setup is Display. Some of the options you find here are also accessible from a menu and will be explained below. Here, we want to focus on the options related to the canvas. These options are placed in the lower part of the dialog.
In the Preferences and the Document Setup you can set the Minimum Scratch Space, which means the space between the borders of the Canvas and a page at a zoom level of 100%.
Gap between Pages is the displayed distance between single pages in a document. Note that this will only change the display of the document in Scribus; it has no influence whatsoever on the display of exported PDF files in a PDF reader.
In the Preferences you can also adjust the display size, ie. put a ruler on the screen and adjust to match. The new size will be the zoom level 100% in new documents. Unfortunately, this only works for new files, not for the current one.
Page and Document Options
Most options in the View menu are related to the display of pages or documents. Fit in Window (Ctrl+0) reduces the zoom level, so that each page can be fully displayed. The following list of zoom levels is self-explaining, and Thumbnails sets the zoom level to 20%.
The next section of the menu contains options to switch on or off certain elements of a document or the canvas. In the image below you see Scribus' default settings:
- Show Margins: By default, Scribus will indicate the page margins with blue lines. If you don't want to see the lines to get a general impression of a whole page, you can switch the display of margins off and on here.
- Show Frames: Just like with margins you can switch off the black dotted lines that indicate frame shapes to get a better impression of the final page. Note that selected items will nevertheless be indicated by red dotted lines and handles.
- Show Images: See below.
- Show Grid: Scribus provides two grids that can help you placing items with precision. You can switch those grids on and off here. For more information about grids, see the section Placing and Moving Items with Precision.
- Show Guides: Guides are lines that can help you placing items with precision. You can switch the display of guides on or off here. By default, guides are visible. For more information about guides, see the chapter Placing and Moving Items with Precision. The Picture below shows a page with grids and guides visible.
The color of margins, guides and grids, as well as the values for the grids can be configured in the Guides tab of Document Setup for the current Document and in the Preferences for all future documents:
Further document related options can be found in the Document Setup/Preferences in the “Display” tab:
- Clicking on the button with the caption “Color” brings up a color selector. For instance, you can choose another page color to emulate another paper color than white.
- Display Unprintable Area in Margin Color: To better distinguish the margins from the print space, you can visualize them by checking this option in the Display tab:
Text Options
Some viewing options in the View menu relate only to text frames.
- Show Text Frame Columns: If you are using columns, you can make the inner column borders visible here:
- Show Baseline Grid: The baseline grid is a special grid, that is used to determine the line spacing (For more information about the baseline grid, see the section Working with TextFrames).ENDNOTE You can make it visible here. By default it is not displayed:
- Show Text Chain: If text frames are linked, the link can be indicated by arrows that also show the direction of the text flow (For more information about the linking text frames, see the section Working with TextFrames).ENDNOTE You can make them visible here. By default they aren't displayed. If you want to see the control characters (special symbols for empty spaces, line breaks etc.) in text trames, you have to use View > Show Control Characters:
Document Preview
To hide all guides, grids, frame markers etc. in one go, you can press F11 on the keyboard. Pressing F11 a second time will make them visible again.
Image Options
Scribus provides some useful viewing options for images, most of which are related to performance.
If you want to focus on working with text or vector graphics, you can switch the display of images on or off altogether by using View > Show Images. To switch the display for a single image on or off, use Image Visible in the context menu.
You can also change the display resolution of images. By default, Scribus uses a reduced resolution for performance reasons, which is called “Normal Resolution”. You can change this in the context menu under Preview Settings. Your further options are the full resolution and a very low resolution. The default behavior can be changed in File > Document Setup > Tools > Image Frames for the current document and in the respective tab in File > Preferences for future documents.
If you edited the image in an external image editing program, you have to use Update Image in the context menu to see the changes made to the image. If you open a file, all images will be updated automatically.
Zooming
Beside the list box for the measuring units of the rulers you find several functions to change the display size of the document. In the spin box you can enter a zoom level. If you click on the magnifier buttons, the zoom level shown in the spin box will be either doubled or halved by default. You can change this behavior in Preferences/Document Setup in the “Tools” tab by clicking on the magnifier icon and by changing the value for “Stepping” (see: Preferences and Document Setup).ENDNOTE
By clicking on the button with the caption “1:1”, the zoom level is reset to 100%.
If you are using a wheel mouse, you can zoom in and out of the canvas by pressing Ctrl and scrolling the wheel.






