Grids and Guides
From Scribus Documentation Project
There are three elements we are going to cover in this section: page grid, baseline grid, and page guides. Something all these have in common is that they do not become part of your printed output or PDF. They are tools you can use to assist your layout design.
Page Grid
These resemble the familiar graph paper used for many years to help place items easily, line one up with another, and also give some information about proportions. One could easily figure out the comparative area covered by content versus white space if that were desired.
More or less a page grid is always available, but the default is that it is switched off. Display it by clicking View > Show Grid. Like some types of graph paper, you can have darker major lines and lighter minor lines. Go to the chapter on Preferences and Document Setup to see that you can change the spacing of major and minor lines, their colors, and whether they automatically are shown in a new document. If you save a document with them showing, they will show when the document is loaded, regardless of Preferences settings. The default settings for the page grid are 20 points between minor lines and 100 points between major lines, even if your dimensions are in other units. If you are using millimeters, for example, your defaults will be 7.056 mm and 35.278 mm respectively.
The page grid can be used merely as a passive background, but if you select Page > Snap to Grid from the menu bar, a frame or other object you are moving will have a sense of magnetism for the grid and will align itself with the vertical and horizontal lines. In Preferences/Document Setup you can choose to have the grid in the background of all objects, the default, or appear to be in front of them. There are also settings for the “stickiness” of the grid as it attracts objects – the snap distance and grab radius.
Also note that Snap to Grid does not affect objects already in place on the document, and only is in operation when you are moving an object by clicking on it and dragging with the mouse. If you create a new frame with Snap to Grid turned on, the new Frame will align with and adjust its dimensions to the grid. Nonetheless your ability to make size and position adjustments in the X, Y, Z tab of the Properties Palette is not interfered with.
Baseline Grid
This is something like the page grid, but is used only for aligning text in a text frame. Similar to page grid, it is always available but turned off by default, switched on with View > Show Baseline Grid, and has settings adjustable in Preferences and Document Setup. The default spacing for baseline grid is the same as the default line spacing, which makes sense since this is what the baseline grid is used for.
Use of the baseline grid is a feature of text, and thus is controlled in the Text tab of the Properties Palette or with paragraph styles. Details can be found in the chapter on styles, under discussion of line spacing and offset to baseline of characters. Each text frame, and within each frame each paragraph style can have its own settings in regard to the baseline grid. It is used for aligning text from one frame to another, and from one column to another in the same frame.
Guides
A drawback of the page grid is the fact that, whether you want it to or not, it covers the entire page, and when you have “Snap to Grid” turned on, the stickiness to the grid can be problematic.
Guides are like individual horizontal or vertical lines from a grid which you create, as many in number and in as many positions on the page as you desire. Unlike the page grid and baseline grid, there are no default guides.
Create guides by clicking Page > Manage Guides, which brings up the “Manage Guides” dialog.
Here is the Manage Guides dialog as it initially appears. When this screenshot was made, there was no content on the currently selected page, otherwise you would see a thumbnail version of any content in the preview area.
Begin making guides by clicking “Add” underneath the “Horizontal” or “Vertical Guides” areas. You immediately see a new guide in your list at 0.00 Y-Pos or X-Pos, depending on which type you have created. Now use the spinbox in any of the various ways you have become familiar with in other dialogs. Your adjustments will apply to whichever guide is highlighted, and as you do so, it will move across the page in the preview thumbnail.
Once you are satisfied, you have the option to lock guides and also apply to all pages of your document if you wish. Just as with the page grid, you can check Page > Snap to Guides, which incidentally will include snapping to margins.
Here we see a few arbitrary guides for this page. Note that both a horizontal and a vertical guide can be simultaneously highlighted and adjusted.
Finally, you can automatically generate collections of guides with this area of the dialog, dividing your page or a selected frame into rows and columns.
Once you have finished, clicking “Update” at the bottom of the dialog will add these to your lists above, where they can be individually edited.
If you prefer a less mathematical and more visual way to create guides, click in the rulers and drag horizontal or vertical guides with mouse to the canvas. You can move all guides with the mouse on the canvas by moving the mouse pinter over a guide. When the cursor turns into a double-sided arrow, click on the guide and move it to another position.
There are several ways to delete guides from a page or a document. The most obvious is to open Page > Manage Guides. Each guide is listed in the two guide columns, where you can select it and click “Delete”. You can also remove a guide by selecting it with the mouse as described in the previous paragraph and dragging it to a ruler. Also be aware that the creation of guides is recorded by the action history, so that it can be undone in Windows > Action History or by right-clicking on a page and clicking “Undo”.



