Thursday, April 5, 2012

The Most Important Thing

 
You didn’t really think I was going to say you could use a tool and then go away and not show you that it really can be done?

I was talking about Scribus, the free, Open Source desktop publishing software which you can download and use in place of That Which Cannot Be Named.

When we left our last episode I was telling you you could use this software to make all sorts of greeting cards, for your own use, which comes in handy when you discover you’ve forgotten Aunt Hepsbub’s birthday and it’s six o’clock at night and the birthday is two days from now on the east coast and if you don’t get a card in the mail at first light tomorrow it will never reach ole Auntie in time to prevent the family, including your snotty sister who never forgets to do the right thing from grinding your ass about the forgotten birthday card for the next millennia!

Or you could start making and selling your own line of greeting cards using the art which you so brilliantly create, but then never have a clue what to do with and it winds up stuck in the closet gathering dust until the next open show or public hanging when you drag it out and spend two hours getting all of the dust which has by now settled into every crack and joint in the frame and wouldn’t your time be better spent making new art and getting back a buck or two instead of chasing dust bunnies out of the frames hiding in your closet?

So there we were talking about Scribus, but I went away and left you with no idea how to use it and even if I had you aren’t sure it will do the job I claimed it would and that’s what people are always doing which sort of explains why this country is in such a mess with everyone claiming they can do wonders and the going away without actually working a single wonder.

But not me, I have come to tell you the whole story.

So let’s review, Scribus, it’s free, you can download it and it works on your very own Windows system and when you get brave and decide to chuck the Windows world forever you will still be able to use it when you put Linux on your computer.


Gee the Windows version is right on the top. That’s right, it is and it is available from Wikipedia so you can feel pretty sure that no nastiness has been added to the download, but if you have any questions about the download site you can also get Scribus from


or even


Cnet which is another very safe place for you to download software and not wind up with a hard drive full of crapware.

So you went and downloaded it, clicked on the install file and let it do its thing and now its there and you want to know what in the heck to do with it.

Okay, it will take some getting used to. The interface isn’t as user-friendly as I would like, but it took me just over an hour to design, discover and print my first card and you can do it too.

 Click Image For Larger View

This is what the outside of the card will look like. I used a picture from my hard drive, took the simple Copyright statement from the Word file I keep it in and placed them all on the page.

Scribus opens to a new document pop-up. Select the Single Page option and let it bring it up. The one thing you might want to do is change the default unit from pts to inches. I never really got the hang of pts so I did mine in inches and nothing bad happened.

Once the page is up go to the Insert Menu and select Insert Image Frame. It may take you a coupla minutes to work it out, but you use the rulers on the side and top to select the place for your image and mark it off. If you did it right it will be “blued” out and then appear with an X across it’s space.

Right click inside the X’ed portion and when the pop-up menu comes up select Insert Image. When the image appears you may have to right click it once again and select Adjust Image To Frame, but you are smart enough to do that, right.

You’re half way through the first part. Now go back to the empty part of the document which should be at the top of the page and insert your simple Copyright slug, by selecting Insert Text frame. Use the curser to make the frame as large as you need and when you have it the right size, right click and select Get Text. It will bring up a pop-up where you can navigate just like you would in Explorer and find the file where you keep the slug and select it. Your declaration will appear in the window and you can move on to the last step of the first half, at the top of the page on the Tool Bar there is an icon which looks like two erasers stacked off center. This will allow you to rotate the text so click on it and move to the text box where you will see two arrows chasing each other. Use the tool to rotate your text box 180 degrees, that’s turn it upside down if you are mathematically challenged and you’re done. If the text box got moved off of the place you wanted it go back and reposition it. Now most important, save the work! Save it some place you’ll remember it like, MY Card Creations or the Really Big Deal folder.

Close the document once it has been saved and open a new document with the same choice you made to start with Single Page. Go to the Insert Menu and select Insert Text Frame and type in your message. The nice part about doing a card yourself is you can say things Hallmark never dared to say, like, “Happy Birthday, you lying, cheating, miserable ex-spouse!” or something more adult.

Once you have your text in the box you need to edit it. Right click in the box and select Edit Text. The edit menu is a bit cranky, but you’ll get it right after a few tries. The choice of Fonts is a bit limited, but you don’t have to have every font on the Net to get a good one. I found that some of my old favorites weren’t there and some of the ones I have downloaded for special occasions were, so it’s a mixed bag. Pick one and adjust the type size in the menu located above the text window. When you have one the right size and the right font click the Update button and the text will transform in the box on your document.

Now you do the rotate thingy again and get the text where you want it which is upside down and on the top so that it prints correctly when you want it to and save.


Click Image For Larger View

Now you’ve made a card. Print it any way you like, I always do the outside part first, (That’s the first document I had you save. The one with your art on it, remember?), then I carefully take it out of the printer tray, turn it over keeping the page orientation the same way and put it back in the printer load tray. Print the second document and now you have a completed card.

Okay, you still have to fold it. And Staples will have envelopes for it, Greeting Card Envelopes, pull and seal ivory  5 3/4 X 8 3/4in, 100 to the box.

And yes it is oversized so you’ll have to put one regular stamp and one postcard stamp on it, but that’s a small price to pay for dodging Hallmark so you’ll come out two bucks better on the deal and have a sense of accomplishment and renewed self-esteem. And that’s what your fourth grade teacher always said was the most important thing, right?

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