Working With Styles

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Styles - Why and What They Are

In Scribus, styles are a collection of features which are given a name, and thereby can be used and reused. There are two kinds of Styles in version 1.3.3.x – paragraph styles and line styles. paragraph styles pertain to text, and will be discussed in this chapter. Line styles apply to drawn lines, and therefore will be discussed in the chapter on straight lines and arrows.ENDNOTE Styles allow you to achieve a consistent appearance in your document, without having to reset a complex set of features repeatedly. In addition, you can save them and then reuse in another document. Finally, after they are created, editing them will then make the changes wherever they are applied once they are saved.

Where They Are, How to Make Them

Like many other features in Scribus, there are several paths to styles, both using them and also creating them. If you are going through this manual in sequential fashion, or have simply just started using Scribus on your own, you may be aware of them from the Text tab in the Properties Palette, where there is a button to apply styles. In a new document this will be labelled “No Style”, since none have yet been created. As you will easily find out, when you click this button, you can apply a style, but not create or edit them from there.

Image:Stylesdialog1.png

While it might seem that the Style menu item might be the route to making/editing styles, this is rather unfortunately named, and in versions beyond 1.3.3.x, this menu item has been removed to avoid this confusion. Instead, click on Edit > Paragraph Styles (Alt+E, then P from the keyboard), and you are presented with a dialog such as this one.

Main Edit Style dialog
Main Edit Style dialog

If you have no styles, this dialog will be empty, so to make a style, click New.

This is obviously a complex dialog, so we will describe it in sections. At this point, we will just mention that the bottom window of sample text is strictly for a preview of your font and its characteristics. Note that the preview may slow down your creation of a new style, depending on your CPU. Therefore you can switch it off in the checkbox on top of the preview window.

Name and Character

At the top is the name automatically created for this new style. Change to your liking. Just below this to the left we have a Character section. With a slightly different layout, this corresponds to settings in the Text tab of the Properties Palette, which has been described earlier.

Image:StylesCharacter.png

From top to bottom, we have:

  • Font name, and just under it the available font faces.
  • Next a row of spinboxes for size, width, and height respectively. Width and height are for deviations from the standard features for that font size.
  • Under these are a row of buttons, whose funtions have been described in the previous section. From left to right:
  • Underline
  • Underline Words only (not intervening spaces)
  • Subscript
  • Superscript
  • All Caps
  • Small Caps
  • Strikethrough
  • Outline
  • Shadow

Next are justification choices: Left, Center, Right, Full, and Forced Full.

Finally in this section we have colors: Fill (body of a character), and Line.

To the right of each color selector is a percentage. Click and hold to choose a shading (saturation) from a list or enter a custom value (Other...).

Distances

Image:Stylesdistances.png

Let's cover these spinboxes left to right, by row:

  • Line Spacing. As you will see, when you change the font size, line spacing changes automatically with a size change, at 120% of the font size (the % increase is changeable in the Document Setup or the Preferences). You can then change line spacing independently, but if you go back and change the font size again, line spacing will revert to 120% of the new size. If you click and hold the icon to the left of the spinbox, you can choose Fixed Linespacing, Automatic Linespacing, or Align to Baseline Grid. Automatic Linespacing removes the ability to independently change linespacing. Align to Baseline Grid may be needed to align text in columns within a text frame or even between separate frames.
  • Offset to Baseline of Characters. The baseline itself is a document property set in the Document Setup, but where the characters are placed in relationship to the document's baseline is a feature of the style.
  • Kerning is a relative adjustment of the distances between individual characters for this style as a whole.
  • Spacing above the paragraph. Line spacing will specifically apply to the spacing between lines within a paragraph, and is the default spacing between paragraphs. This setting allows customization of the space above the paragraph, for this particular style.
  • Spacing below the paragraph is analogous to the above setting. Note that the spacing below one paragraph will be added to the spacing above the next paragraph, dependent on its style.

Drop Caps

Image:Storyeditordropcaps.png

This drop cap has subsequently had bold and color change applied to the individual letter. Distance from Text is from the right edge of the letter to left edge of adjacent ones.The vertical distance from the top of the L to adjacent text cannot be adjusted.

This drop cap has subsequently had bold and color change applied to the individual letter.

Distance from Text is from the right edge of the letter to left edge of adjacent ones.

The vertical distance from the top of the L to adjacent text cannot be adjusted.

Drop caps are added to your style here – click the checkbox to activate. Specify the number of lines the drop cap will cover, and the distance from the drop cap to the text just to the right of the drop cap. Note that the drop cap won't adapt to the linespacing if you have adjusted the text to the baseline grid.

These are the only parameters for the built-in feature, but see Drop Caps for alternative and much more flexible ways to create drop caps.

Tabulators

Tab stop types
Tab stop types
Appearance of stops on the ruler: Left, Right, Period (selected), Comma, Center
Appearance of stops on the ruler:
Left, Right, Period (selected), Comma, Center

Tabulators were also covered in Working With Text,ENDNOTE as we worked our way through the Shape tab of the Properties Palette. Here we will just briefly review the process for making tabs. The first step to making a tab stop is to click on the ruler. By default you will create a left tab stop. Once you have done this, you can then change the type to the choices seen here, and more precisely place the tab with your mouse or the Position spinbox.

Left, right, and center tab stops are straightforward. Period obviously can be used for lining up decimal numbers. Since much of the world uses a comma as a decimal separator, this explains the choice “Comma”.


Keep clicking the ruler to add more tab stops, drag them off to delete. As noted in Working With Text,ENDNOTE you can also edit tab stops in the main window in the editing mode of text frames.

Fill Char choices
Fill Char choices

Finally, in Fill Char there is the ability to assign a character other than the default empty space in between tab stops. Custom can be any individual character you assign.

Indentation

There are two aspects to indentation – what happens to the first line, and what happens to the rest (body) of a paragraph. In Scribus, each can be adjusted independently, though for obvious reasons everything must happen within the boundaries of the text frame.

Image:Indentation default.png

Image:Indentation custom.png

Perhaps a bit hard to recognize, but the top ruler shows the default placement of indentation markers, all the way to the left of the ruler. There are two separate markers, best seen when they are separated such as in the bottom ruler. The top, downward-pointing marker is for the first line, the bottom, upward-pointing marker is for the rest of the paragraph, and the spinboxes for each show -20.0 and 30.0 points, respectively. The units here correspond to the units you are using for your document. In case it is not apparent, the measurement for the first line is always a relative distance from the marker for the body.

A Final Word: Background

When you change a font's color in Edit > Paragraph Styles, the preview display font color will change. If this is a very pale color, visibility can be enhanced by clicking the Background button just above the text display window to obtain a better contrast.

Using Styles From Another Document

Edit Styles revisited
Edit Styles revisited

Here is our Edit > Paragraph Styles dialog once again. You may have noticed the Import and Save buttons, and you may think these are complementary operations – well, not quite.

When you click Save, your styles are saved to the document you are working on.

What happens when you click Import is that a file dialog comes up to identify a saved .sla file from which to import its styles. The styles from that document can be imported for your use in the current one.

Look below to see the dialog from which you can Import all or some of those styles, meanwhile making sure there are no name conflicts.

Image:Importstyles.png

Here is a tip on how to make efficient use of the import feature. For styles which you may use frequently in many of your documents, create an .sla file which is empty, except for containing a number of different styles for importing to other documents – this can be a great timesaver.

You can also copy text frames with applied styles to the Scrapbook.ENDNOTE Dragging such a frame to the canvas in a new document will automatically add all styles stored in the frame to the document.

Duplicate, in case it's not obvious, can be used to save time by only slightly modifying an existing style.

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