A couple of weeks ago BlogIT introduced Scribus, an opensource desktop publishing program with advanced features. Today we will look at its runaround feature – through a simple to follow step-by-step tutorial you will see how to get text to flow around an irregularly shaped picture.
1. The first thing to do is to launch Scribus and create a new document. For this tutorial, an A4 one page document will do.
2. Now click the ‘Insert Text Frame’ icon and draw a large text frame.
3. In order to add text into the text frame, select the ‘Edit contents of frame’ icon. This will allow you to type, copy/paste or import text.
4. Fill the text frame with text.
5. Now we will split the text frame in two columns. From the Windows menu, enable the ‘Properties’ panel, then click the arrow next to ‘Columns & Text Distances’ to reveal this feature’s options.
6. Using the arrows to the right of ‘Columns’, select ‘2′ – this will split the text frame into two columns. Following this, keep adding to the ‘Gap’ until you are happy with the space between the columns, as seen here:
7. In this step, we will import a picture into this document. First create an image frame in which a picture will be inserted – just click the ‘insert image frame’ icon.
8. Draw an image frame and import an image into it (File menu -> Import -> Get Image). Place the image frame in the middle of the text frame as shown below.
9. As you can see in the above image, the ‘white space’ within the image frame overlaps the text. The text frame has to be edited in a way that it goes round the external shape of the picture.
From the ‘properties’ panel, expand the ’shape’ option, then select ‘Use Frame Shape’ option. Click ‘Edit’ button – here you can edit the frame in a way that it goes around the image’s contour. This panel contains a lot of buttons and options, but for this tutorial only a couple are needed.
Add a bunch of nodes on the frame by enabling ‘Add Node’ then clicking on the frame. Add a few of these, and then move them one by one around your picture. You can add more nodes as you go if needed – extra nodes can be removed by selecting ‘remove node’ icon and clicking on them.
After selecting the ‘Move Node’ icon you can move nodes around to the edge of the picture. When done click ‘End Editing’.
10. That’s all – the end result should look something like this (please note that the light grey line is just a guide, it will not show if you do a print out):
Conrad Fenech
ICT Support Teacher
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