## General Questions

- How do I contact the Scribus Team or find interactive help?
- Color Management does not appear in the menu.
- How do get I formatted tables in Scribus?
- Help! My palettes have disappeared!
- Scribus is slow to launch. Why ?
- What is the difference between PDF 1.3, PDF 1.4 and PDF 1.5 ?
- Why don't my fonts display properly on Red Hat 8, 9 or Fedora Core-1 ?
- How do you change paper size once the a has been created?
- How do you get a printer to print on a non standard size page?
- I get a "QClipboard: internal error, qt_xclb_wait_for_event recursed" error in the console when dragging and dropping from the KDE Desktop. What causes this?
- The CUPS options do not show up in print options dialog, what is wrong?
- Scribus crashes when launching and searching for fonts. I have updated my freetype2. I upgraded my freetype2 to enable the bytecode interpreter.
- Is there something wrong with the location of the scribus-1.6 RPMs? Whenever I try to download I am unable to get anything - usually the browser (Firefox, Mozilla) will complain it cannot read the source file.
- Scribus seems to hang in an infinite loop when importing EPS or PS files. Why?
- Why don't images print on a HP LaserJet 1xxx series printer from within Scribus or from exported PS/PDF files, but can be viewed in PDFs.
- How do I compile Scribus with debugging enabled ?
- How do I get Arabic text to display correctly with proper glyph shaping and RTL text direction, the most I can get out of Scribus right now is RTL text with no glyph shaping?

### Answers

- How do I contact the Scribus Team or find interactive help?

  1. There is an active and friendly mailing list details at http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus. The archives are also searchable at http://nsj.srem.pl/cgi-bin/search.cgi

  2. Find the developers on IRC, on the irc.freenode.net network in the #scribus channel.

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- Color Management does not appear in the menu.

  Make sure you have .icc and or .icm profiles in the /scribus/profiles directory, or in the directory that you have set in Settings->Preferences. Ideally, you will have a set of profiles which includes one for your monitor, one for the images and any scanner or input device profiles and profiles for your printer or output device. You need a minimum of 1 RGB color space icc profile and 1 CMYK icc color space profile for the color managment options to be enabled. See the details in Color Management for Scribus for links and info about color profiles.

  If you install littlecms from an rpm, make sure you have installed the development libraries as well. If not, install the rpm, run ldconfig or /sbin/ldconfig as root, remove config.cache from the source directory, then run ./configure again and recompile.

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- How do get I formatted tables in Scribus?

  Scribus added basic table support in 1.1.6

  One suggestion for placing formatted tables and sections of spreadsheets is the following:

  - Create the table in a spreadsheet in either StarOffice or OpenOffice.org 1.1.x (recommended as a first choice). Format the table with the desired fonts, sizing and background colors for the cells.
  - "Print" the file saving as PS, by printing a "file" to the "generic printer".
  - Open the just created PostScript file in GSView (Version 4.6 or newer recommended)
  - File > Convert > Select Device epswrite
  - Choose 300 or more dpi as the resolution and save. Then, place the image as an EPS. Scribus will print this with the colors, shading and fonts intact. The screen preview may not be perfect, but it will either export as PDF or print just fine.
  - Alternative: Import as an SVG, as outlined: Importing Tricks for Scribus
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- Help! My palettes have disappeared!

  Close Scribus. Then open ~/.scribus/scribus.rc, a hidden file in your home directory in a text editor. Then look down in the file for the section beginning about 10 lines from the top. ex: MEASUREMENTS YPOS="-264" XPOS="-692" VISIBLE="1"

  Notice the negative numbers in front of the YPOS and XPOS statements. Remove the minus, set the visible setting to 0 and save. You might find the coordinates too large: (YPOS="3046" XPOS="7690") Either way, these coordinates are screen positions in pixels. They should be within 1024x768 or whatever screen resolution you are running. Restart Scribus and go Tools > and select show for the missing palette. It will reappear like normal.

  **This has been corrected in the most recent versions of Scribus and should not be a problem in the future.

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- Scribus is slow to launch. Why ?

  For those who are new at desktop publishing, unlike most programs, DTP applications care greatly about which fonts are installed and if the font paths are valid. So, when Scribus launches, one of the things it does is to completely and thoroughly scan your font paths and ensure they are valid. This takes time. If you have a large number of fonts (200+) or more and slow launch times are a problem, reduce the number of fonts or font paths.

  The other reason is your scrapbook might be filled with complex or large image files. Deleting uneeded items or saving the scrapbook under a different name and then creating a new blank scrapbook will also help reduce the startup time.

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- What is the difference between PDF 1.3, PDF 1.4 and recently released PDF 1.5 ?

  PDF 1.2 = Acrobat 3.0 - relatively obsolete now

  PDF 1.3 = Acrobat 4.0 - The first version of PDF which truly had all the needed features to support "press-ready" PDFs including color managment, ICC profiles etc. It also added javascript, interactive and multimedia capabilities. This standard is probably the safest to send if you are unsure of the capabilities of the receiver of your file. PDF/X-3 and a number of commercial print work flows are based on PDF 1.3.

  PDF 1.4 = Acrobat 5.0 - Actually, introduced with Illustrator 9, The main difference to concern Scribus users is PDF 1.4, has both transparency and alpha transparency capabilites, which make a major difference in where a PDF with these features can be printed. It takes wither the latest commerical RIP's or a Level 3 PostScript printer to use these features properly. The latest versions of Ghostscript suport the advanced PDF 1.4 features Scribus can create when exporting PDF.

  PDF 1.5 = Acrobat 6.0 - Adobe has publicly released the final spec - 1100 pages of light reading :) of PDF 1.5 to accompany the recently released Acrobat 7. Among the most interesting for Scribus users: many improvements for "press-ready" PDF, the capability to have true layering within the PDF, PDF-X "pre-flight" capability, more security and interactive features, like the ability to add comments which are separate from the original doc.

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- Why don't my fonts do not display properly on Red Hat 8,9 or Fedora Core-1 ?

  Upgrade your version of Scribus to 1.1.1 or newer. It has a new font discovery mechanism which works with fontconfig and the new font system in RH 8+

  The other issue is the startkde script, if you run KDE it causes the font paths to be overridden to inacessable font paths. A bug has been filed against kdebase : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=110681

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- How do you change paper size once page has been created?

  You can't

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- How do you get printer to print on a non standard size page?

  It depends:

  1. If you are printing to a local printer which is *not* a PostScript printer, but using CUPS, you can't. It is a limitation, as far as we can tell of CUPS.
  2. If you have a "real" PostScript printer, Scribus - with CUPS support - will support any arbitrary page size, as long as the printer support it.
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- I get a "QClipboard: internal error, qt_xclb_wait_for_event recursed" error in the console when dragging and dropping from the KDE Desktop. What causes this ?

  See: http://bugs.scribus.net/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=0000045. This is a long standing bug in Qt. SuSE 9.0 users can upgrade to the Qt3 3.3.1-2 or higher. RedHat or Fedora users can upgrade to qt-3.3.1-6 or higher.

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- The CUPS options do not show up in print options dialog, What is wrong?

  See this bug: http://bugs.scribus.net/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=0000271 for and explanation of how CUPS can be mis-configured.

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- Scribus crashes when launching and searching for fonts and I have updated my freetype2. I upgraded my freetype2 to enable the bytecode interpreter.

  We do not recommend trying to update freetype2, except rebuilding your existing distros Source RPMS or source packages.

  1. Recent versions of freetype have an autohinter which works very well.
  2. *Many* packages are compiled against freetype2 (Xfree86,Qt, Gtk etc..), upgrading freetype2, might require recompiling all of these packages or system instability might result.
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- Is there something wrong with the location of the scribus-1.6 RPMs? Whenever I try to download I am unable to get anything - usually the browser (Firefox, Mozilla) will complain it cannot read the source file.

  It is a Firefox bug as best we can tell. Downloads with Moz 1.6 and Konqueror - even (shudder) IE seem to work fine. We have had over 2000 rpms 1.1.6 downloaded..

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- Scribus 1.1.7+ seems to hang in an infinite loop when importing EPS or PS files. Why?

  Three possible solutions:

  1. Upgrade Ghostscript to GS 8.15 or GS 8.50. There are notes in the Toolbox section on parallel installs of GS.
  2. Reduce the complexity of your EPS/PS file.
  3. You do not have enought memory/swap space when importing complex EPS files.
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- Why don't images do not print on a HP LaserJet 1xxx series printer(or other B&W laser)from within Scribus or from exported ps/pdf files, but can be viewed in PDFs.

  One workaround is to export your document to PDF then load it into AcrobatReader and print at PS level 2.

  Another solution is to create a non PostScript printer (E.g. for a HP LJ 1300 series a printer was set up in CUPS as hplj with lj5gray printer). That works for some apps/docs, too. In general,create a ps2 level printer. Make sure you use the PPD file from the windowsdriver package instead of the cups/foomatic one. You will get better results during the conversion.

  The reason is Scribus is generating PS3 level objects which the PS interpreter is unable to understand. This is a frequent issue with Black and White laser jets when printing from Desktop Publishing apps - I've seen this with LJ4 and 5, as well as newer HP2xxx printers with Pagemaker, Quark Xpress and Indesign.

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- How do I compile Scribus with debugging enabled?

  `./configure --enable-debug`

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- How do i get Arabic text to display correctly with proper glyph shaping and RTL text direction, the most I can get out of Scribus right now is RTL text with no glyph shapeing?

  The glyph shaping is a very difficult thing to achieve, we plan to add this in one of the 1.3.x Developers versions.

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