Document Settings and Preferences

Under the File heading on the menu bar, you will find two related entries, Document Setup and Preferences. Each of these brings up a dialog used for changing various default settings and other behavior in Scribus:

For Scribus versions 1.5+, Preferences has a new look, mostly a redistribution of the same settings there were in previous versions.

User Interface (not present in Document Setup)

Paths

The various “paths” are the default locations Scribus will use. The path for scripts is where Scribus looks when you choose Scripts > Execute Script from the menu bar.

Document Setup

In Preferences, the various settings here will be those that you see when you create a new document (File > New). In the Document Setup, they will change the current document.

Guides

Typography

Here are the default settings for various typographic features.
Some typographic terms
To the left, we are showing the baseline in gray, x-height or midline in green, ascender height in magenta, and descender height in blue. The terms ‘x-height’ and ‘descender height’ refer to the distance from the baseline, ‘ascender height’ refers to the distance from the x-height. For clarity, the caps height was not marked, but this would be the top of the ‘T’.

Item Tools

In the Tools tab you can change the default settings for the various objects you create.

Operator Tools

Hyphenator/Hyphenation

Hyphenation details are described here: Hyphenation in Scribus.

Fonts

Selecting and installing fonts correctly is one of the most important configuration items with Scribus, and an extensive set of notes is here: Fonts and Scribus. If there is one part of the documentation you really must read, it is this one.

Color Management

There are detailed notes on this topic in the Color Management section.
Color Management Preferences

Note: You will not be able to export to PDF/X-3 if color management is not enabled, and the Preferences settings for this format will likewise not be available. You can only set the Monitor Profile if no document is open.

Printer/Printing

The settings here of course apply to printing from your local printer attached to your computer, or perhaps printing to a file instead, which creates a PostScript file of your document. Thus, many of these are the same as you see in the printing dialog. So we can set our defaults in Preferences.

PDF Export

Remember that the settings here simply change the default values for PDF Export. You can still override any settings with the PDF Export dialog. For more info on PDF look at PDF Export Options and PDF/X-3 and Scribus.

PDF Export Preferences

Preflight Verifier

See the information about Printing Tools to learn more about the configuration options in this panel.

Document Item Attributes

Aside from storing additional information about a given item, this feature is currently most useful in connection with the creation of a table of contents.

Table of Contents

A use of the settings is explained here: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Creating_a_Table_of_Contents

Keyboard Shortcuts

Setting the Keyboard Shortcuts  for Scribus

Here you see the various default keyboard shortcuts, which are editable, and many others can be assigned. Moreover, once customized, you can export them into a separate XML file that can be exported and saved separately, along with making it portable to other machines. The default file suffix is .ksxml. This is a Unicode file and should not have issues being transported across platforms, with the only caveat that Macs have an option and command meta key, where Linux, UNIX, OS/2, eComStation and Windows share common keyboards.

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 preview size of items in the Scrapbook palette and whether Scrapbooks should be saved automatically when changed.

Spelling

Manage your available spelling dictionaries here.

Display (not all of these are available in Document Settings)

Most of these are pretty straightforward. Depending on the size of your screen, you can use this to adjust the scale of and rearrange your workspace. If you have plenty of space, you may want to adjust the display to accurately reflect your document size by default. Remember, you can adjust the magnification settings in Operator Tools > Zoom. You can only adjust Display Scaling in Preferences and with no document open.

Display Settings

The Colors tab allows for customization of the colors used for various screen features, such as the scratch space, border of an active page, and frames in their various states of selected, grouped, linked, and so on. In Document Settings only Fill Color is available. It’s also worth mentioning here that the Fill Color only has to do with the appearance of the document background and is not printed or exported to PDF.

External Tools

This panel enables you to change the default settings for the location of Ghostscript and other external programs. If you have installed Ghostscript before installing Scribus, it is usually detected automatically. If you receive an error message indicating that EPS files cannot be used, this is where the settings can be changed to allow Scribus to find the correct location of Ghostscript.

Linux, UNIX, OS/2, eComStation and Windows:

External Tools Settings

This particular screenshot comes from Linux and is also applicable to other UNIX systems. See the Windows, OS/2 and eComStation specific information for these operating systems. Some additional information about Ghostscript can be found in Advanced Ghostscript.

Mac OS X

External Tools Settings

Above are the recommended settings, provided you have correctly installed the Ghostscript framework.

Other External Tools

Image Processing Tool

You are not restricted to using GIMP for image editing, and could use any available image editor such as Krita, or even Photoshop. However, GIMP is set as the default application, as it’s the most popular Open Source image editing software.

Web Browser

Here you can set the path to the executable file of the browser that will be used if you click an external link in the Help Browser or select an external source from the Help menu.

PDF Viewer

When you export to PDF, you now have an option to open your PDF in a viewer.

Uniconvertor

This is used for importing various graphics file formats so that they can be used in Scribus. Further specifics about Uniconvertor are here.

Render Frames

See Working with Render Frames.

Miscellaneous

Page Sizes

Here we see why we had such a short list of choices for document sizes in Document Setup, and of course here is the remedy.

Plugins

This is an informational display about the various plug-ins you have at your disposal, how to use them, and where their libraries are located.

Image Cache

Using an image cache can speed up screen refreshes and migration through a larger document with many images.

Short Words

Short Words is a plug-in to assist with adding non-breaking spaces to abbreviations like Mr. and measurements like km. Details on configuration and use are here: Short Words in Scribus.

Scripter

If the Scripter plug-in is activated at startup, you will not need to make any changes here to use the included Python scripts.

Scripter Extensions are special Scripter module or scripts which are loaded at startup to modify the abilities of the Python Scripter plug-in within Scribus. Details are here. The Console tab is for choosing syntax highlighting colors within the Scripter Console.

Document Information (available in Document Settings but not in Preferences)

See the section on Document Information.

Where Are the Preferences Files?

Scribus’ preferences are kept in a hidden directory .scribus, the location of which is as follows:

Within the directory are a .scribus150.rc file, and a scribusfont.rc file (which preserves your font preferences). These files are stored in XML format, so you can inspect and edit their contents with a text editor. If you have installed Python, there will also be a scripter.rc file that lists most recently used scripts. There are also several other directories, most which are comprised of configuration or history files. There is also a prefs150.xml which mostly contains information about the canvas when you last closed Scribus, including which dialogs were open.

If you are encountering any issues with a previously working Scribus installation, renaming, not deleting, the .scribus directory may be a good idea – this is useful when you have altered settings in an unacceptable way, and you want to go back to the defaults, which you have forgotten. See the notes on Troubleshooting for more information.


See also