Back Contents

Preference Panels

The preference panel is the heart of changing the default behaviors of Scribus. Scribus' preferences are kept in a .scribus.rc file in your home directory. This file is stored in XML format, so you can inspect its contents with a text editor. If you have a problem with Scribus launching or Scribus crashing repeatedly, try renaming this file scribus.rcbak and restarting Scribus. This will sometimes eliminate odd behavior with palettes, as well.

General Tab You can change the default theme with Scribus to include themes like Liquid or the new themes based on the KDE plug-ins. You can also tune the look of your Qt programs separately with qtconfig. Simply open a console window and type qtconfig The panels are pretty self explanatory. I would advise not increasing the font size above 12 points, as some buttons in Scribus menus might be obscured. In this case, the fonts have been changed to True Type fonts at 12 points and the IceWM theme has been applied.

Scribus Preference Panel # 1

Within these 6 tabs, you can change many of the defaults for Scribus, many of which can be changed or overridden in with a menu or right click context menu.

Mouse settings - If you have a wheel mouse, one of the nice defaults of Scribus is using this to scroll through a document. Wheel jump changes the default distance with each toggle of the mouse wheel. Grab Radius defines how much distance is allowed to select an object. Smaller numbers mean more precise, but sometimes more difficult selection of smaller objects.

Looking at this panel, you also can click on the keyboard shortcuts button and change the default keys for many menu functions and actions.

Typographics - Here you can change options for typographic features including subscript, superscript, automatic line spacing and scaling of small capitals.

Tool Preferences

Tools

Here in this tab you can change the defaults for many common tasks and tools: font, size and color, text frame defaults, image frame defaults and zoom defaults. Most all of these can be overridden or changed with the Frame – Modify from the right click menu when selecting an object.

Polygon Preferences

Recently, added is polygon objects. You can make stars, triangles and convex polygons with intuitive controls. New in 0.7.3 is the ability to rotate polygons. This screen capture from 0.7.3, shows the new liquid theme from Mosfet.

Scrapbook With scrapbooks, you can (right button) drag and drop frequently used items, including pictures, images and text files for quick placement. Scrapbooks can be saved with a file or independently of a document, as a separate scrapbook which can be loaded use with many different documents. Separate scrapbooks are kept with a .scs designation. This panel sets the defaults for the thumbnail size in the scrapbook palette and if scrapbooks should be saved with the file or if you would rather save them as individual scrapbooks.

Display This panel sets the defaults and options for margin colors, frame display, page background and you have the option to display unprintable areas in the selected margin color.


Back Contents