Working With Frames

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Most of the items used in a document are done in one kind of frame or another. These include:

  • Text Frames
  • Image Frames
  • Shapes
  • Polygons

In many cases, these will be used in a straightforward manner, yet depending on a special desired effect, there may be a need to convert from one type to another. These advanced features will be discussed elsewhere. In this section, we will cover the ways of manipulating frames that these have in common.

Contents

Creating a Frame

There are 3 ways to create a frame:

  • Selecting from the menu: Insert > type of Frame.
  • Clicking on the toolbar icon.
  • Keyboard shortcuts: T for Text, I for Image, S for Shape, P for Polygon.

Any one of these activates your mouse, so that pressing down the left button begins the frame at one corner, letting up determines its opposite corner.

Selecting a Frame

In order to work with frames they must be selected. When a frame is created, it is automatically selected, which is signified by having a dotted red outline, plus small red squares at the corners and at the midpoint of each side, used for resizing the frame. To unselect a frame, click anywhere outside it. To select again, click anywhere inside it. If you should have a situation in which you wish to select a frame which is completely underneath another frame, one way to select would be to lower the level of the overlying frame – see the context menus below or the X, Y, Z tab in the Properties Palette. Alternatively, hold down Shift+Ctrl and you can toggle between the two frames with subsequent clicks.

Context Menu

Clicking with left mouse button simply selects it, but with the right button there also appears the context menu, which allows the selection of many common operations particular to that frame type. These operations are covered in the individual chapters on each kind of frame.

Deleting a Frame

You can delete a selected frame by pressing the Del key, selecting Delete from the context menu, or Ctrl+X. None of these will ask for confirmation, and the frame and its contents will simply disappear, but it is recoverable with Undo. If you use Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V will recover the frame and contents in the same position it had occupied. A useful feature is that with Ctrl+V, the frame will be pasted at its original coordinates, but on whatever page is selected.

Cut, Copy and Paste

As just mentioned, Cutting (Ctrl+X, Edit > Cut, or from the context menu) deletes a frame but saves it and its contents in a buffer. Copying (Ctrl+C, Edit > Copy, or from the context menu) saves to the buffer without deleting. Paste (Ctrl+V, Edit > Paste, or from the context menu) retrieves from the buffer to the same coordinates as the original, but importantly, to whatever page is currently selected.

Duplicate, Multiple Duplicate

This sounds like a combination of copy and paste, and in a sense is, since the frame is also copied to a buffer. Duplicate (Item > Duplicate, or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D) copies and then immediately pastes with a default offset of +10 points in each of the X and Y coordinates – if the Document's units are something other than points, the distance will still be equivalent to 10 points.

Multiple Duplicate (Item > Multiple Duplicate) creates one or more copies, and allows the offset to be adjusted. In addition, once the offset has been changed, Duplicate will use the new offset throughout the current session of Scribus. Since the frame is copied to the buffer, the duplicated frame will be used for Paste as well.

Resizing, Repositioning Frames

The quickest way to resize and reposition your frame is with the mouse: click and drag inside the frame to reposition. Resizing is done by clicking on the red rectangular control points at the corners and sides, then stretching or shrinking as desired. For greater precision, use the Properties Palette – if not visible, activate this with Windows > Properties (keyboard: F2). In the Properties Palette, you will see a number of tabs: X ,Y ,Z , Shape, Text, Image, Line, and Colors.

A selected frame can also be repositioned and resized strictly with the arrow keys. Simply pressing the arrow keys moves the frame in the expected direction (eg, the up arrow moves the frame up). Holding down Ctrl will move in tens of page units, holding Shift tenths of units.

If you hold down the Alt key, you can enlarge the frame: up arrow moves the top side, down arrow the bottom, right arrow the right, and left arrow the left side. Holding down Shift-Alt shrinks the frame, but note these differences: up arrow moves the bottom side, down arrow the top, right arrow the left side, left arrow the right.

If you are working with a ahape, you will see that these apply to the bounding box of the shape, however, a rotated shape can be resized in a more complex fashion.

Grouping of Frames

If you have frames in a particular layout and want to manipulate them, meanwhile maintaining their relative positions, you can group them. The first step is to select all of the frames you want in your group, and depending on your needs can be done in various ways:

  • If you want to select all the frames in your document (not likely if you have more than one page), click Edit > Select All (Ctrl+A).
  • If your prames are in a contiguous area, with none that you don't want selected, then simply click-drag your mouse around them.
  • Hold down the Shift key, and click the frames one-by-one.


Once you've done this, you may find you can, by clicking carefully in between frames, move this group of selected frames around, but you run the risk of clicking only one and having the relationship ruined. Better to select Item > Group (Ctrl+G), at which point your group will stay a group until you ungroup them: Item > Ungroup (Ctrl+Shift+G).

What you find now is that when you go to the X, Y, Z tab of the Properties Palette, the various positioning spinboxes, rotation, now apply to your group as a whole. Width and height for the group's members can be adjusted all at once. Line and fill colors, and line properties can also be adjusted to be the same for the whole group. Some other functions, such as manipulating any images or shapes will generally not apply to all images or shapes in the group – usually you will find that only one member of the group is edited. Just as with individual frames, a group can be deleted, cut, copied, and pasted. A group can be copied to the Scrapbook. The ScrapbookENDNOTE is covered in its own chapter.

There is a special operation on shapes and polygons, Combine Polygons, which is discussed in Working with Shapes and Polygons.ENDNOTE

Properties: X, Y, Z

As seen in these images, we have very precise control over the position, size, and rotation of our frames on the page. What may not be so obvious is that these two images show information about the same frame, with the same size and position on the page. The reason the X and Y coordinates are different is that the basepoint has been changed from the upper left corner of the frame in the first image to the lower right in the second. Thus we can use a basepoint at whatever position helps us place the frame properly on the page.

Image:Framegeometry1.png Image:Framegeometry2.png

The basepoint also determines the point around which rotation takes place when using the “Rotation” spinbox.

Here you can adjust position, size (note that the width/height ratio can be linked or unlinked with the chain icons on the right), and rotation. If you rotate an item with the mouse, by clicking the “Rotate Item” icon on the toolbar, rotation works differently: Here, the rotation depends on the position of the mouse pointer. If you click on a corner of a frame and then move the mouse, the opposite corner will be the center of the rotation. Clicking anywhere else and moving the mouse uses the center of the object as the pivotal point.

Image:Framelevel_other.png

Image:Levels_gs.png

Change the level of an item in relationship to others by using the arrow buttons, seen to the left of this image – either one level at a time or all the way to the top or bottom. The adjacent number denotes which level the currently selected object is on.

  • Here are some useful keyboard shortcuts for levels, when you have a frame selected (and not in Edit Contents mode):
    • PgUp/PgDn – move frame up/down one level
    • Home – move frame to top level
    • End – move frame to bottom level

In the cluster of buttons to the right, the two leftmost allow flipping of the frame horizontally or vertically. You can lock the all of the characteristics of a frame (picture of a lock), or all the way to the rightmost the size of the frame. The middle button at the bottom allows or prevents the frame from being printed or exported.

The gray square is on a lower level than the black one. If the frame were selected, the graphic above would indicate it is on the lowest level, namely “1”.

Properties: Shape

In the Shape tab, we begin to see differences depending on the type of frame. For all frames, you can edit their shape, a quick method being to click the top button and select from a table of shapes, but you can also click Edit Shape... to edit the shape of a frame like a vector drawing. You can also round the corners of your frame inwards or outwards by applying positive or negative values in the spinbox.

Text Flows Around Frame

Another feature common to all frames is at the bottom of the Shape tab, where you can elect to have text flowing around a frame – this will apply when you have a text frame behind the frame for which this is selected. When you check this box, the default behavior is for text to flow around the frame.

When a frame is created, the frame, the bounding box, and the contour line will coincide with each other. The easiest way to see the difference between the frame and the bounding box is to rotate the frame – you must then move the frame with the mouse to see its bounding box, which is always a rectangle. The frame rotates, but the bounding box will continue to have horizontal and vertical sides, enlarging to indicate the X and Y coordinate space that the frame takes up. The contour line moves with the rotation of the frame, but it is actually a second frame that can be edited separately in the “Edit Shape” dialog, activated from the Shape tab in the Properties Palette. Check “Edit Contour Line” and you can change the contour line like a vector graphic to then use it for flowing text. For example, one could have a circular text flow around a rectangular frame.

To learn about editing shapes, which is the same process and same dialog as “Edit Contour Line”, read Working with Shapes and Polygons.ENDNOTE

Image:Textflowsexample_gs.png

Here we show these separate structures: bounding box (dotted red line), contour line (in blue since it's being edited), and image frame boundary (dotted black line). As shown here, the contour line can fall outside the bounding box.


You can choose which one of these to have text flow around, the default being the image frame boundary.

Text frames show in the mid-portion of the tab the ability to set the number of text columns within the frame, gap between columns, and the distances of the text from the edge of the frame. You can also manage tabulators – see Working with Text.ENDNOTE

Properties: Line

For a frame, the line properties apply to the border of the frame. In order for the border to show, it must have a line color assigned, which has to be set in the color tab of the Properties Palette. By default, text and image frames have no line color, shapes and polygons are set to black. The thickness, the type of line and the type of edge are adjusted in this tab. Five types of lines and three types of edges are available. The examples below show how different settings affect the frame border:

Properties: Color

As mentioned above, text and image frames have no default line color. The fill color is “None” for text and image frames. Although it may seem nonsensical for a frame with an image to have a fill (background) color, it may be that the frame is larger than the loaded image, in which case this color will fill the balance of the frame space. You can also assign a shade (saturation) and opacity of the line or fill color, and for fill, various gradients types can also be selected. In this case you will select two or more colors for the gradient fill – appropriate widgets will appear. While Scribus allows opacity for any document, when you export to PDF, only PDF versions since PDF 1.4 allow for transparency.

The other tabs of the Properties Palette will be described in the following sections.

Magic Wand

If you have a Frame selected, you will see a magic wand, or perhaps only a star on a stick in the Toolbar. Its tooltip will tell you that it copies item properties. At this time, it will copy only a frame's line and fill colors from one frame to another, regardless of frame type. Click the wand a second time or another tool on the toolbar to deactivate it.

Frames Without Content

There is also a potential use for a frame with nothing or almost nothing in it. A page-sized frame could give the background of the layout a color or an image. An empty frame with only its border showing creates an empty box, a box which might be transparent inside, have text flow around it, have an opaque or only partially opaque color. Sometimes an otherwise invisible frame helps to control text flow in an easier way than working with existing frames on the page. For these purposes, a frame could be of any type, since all frames can be used in this manner. Such minimalist frames can allow for some interesting effects.

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