Unlike using a wordprocessor, Scribus uses a frames environment. Therefore, you cannot simply enter text on a document page. See Working with Frames to learn about frame creation and manipulation. Once you have a text frame, your task now is to put some text into it.
You may place text into a text frame in the following ways:
This is listed first because it has or had been the recommended way to enter text manually from the keyboard. At this stage of Scribus development, some argue that Story Editor has lost any unique approach to editing text. Currently, by using Edit Contents mode combined with the Text Properties palette, you can more readily edit your frame and have the advantage of instantly seeing the results of your edits on the canvas. If there might be one advantage in Story Editor, it is in a situation where text may be linked from one fame to another and over several pages. In this case you can easily move through the entirety of the linked text in the editor window.
Bring up the Story Editor (SE) from the Context Menu or with Ctrl+T. Its main disadvantage is that you will not see the final appearance of the text until you update the frame, with or without exiting SE. It's worth running your cursor over the toolbar icons to note that, beginning with the 4th icon from the left, you can exit SE and update the frame, leave SE without updating the frame, reload from the frame (losing any edits), and update the frame without exiting. SE has a convenient way to apply Paragraph Styles and their associated Character Styles, but not Character Styles by themselves. Both of these are quite easy now combining Edit Contents and Text Properties.
A selected frame can enter Edit Contents mode by clicking the Edit Contents icon on the toolbar or double-clicking on the frame (keyboard: E). The advantage of this is that you can see immediately the appearance of your additions or edits. It is a bit slower, since screen refreshes are involved. You can use Properties to change the font, style, and other characteristics such as linespacing. For small edits and frames which only contain a small amount of text, Edit Contents can serve your needs well.
You may also insert any graphics in a line of text. Simply copy the item (Ctrl+C, for example), then paste into the line of text while in Edit Contents mode. This will not work in Story Editor.
We’ll collapse our above list a bit, so that we consider all these unformatted, formatted, and tagged files close together.
Clicking Get Text will bring up a file dialog and by default look for files ending in .csv, .html, .htm, .odt, .pdb, .sxw, and .txt, so if you save a plain text file, try to save as *.txt. You can also import .doc files in Linux if you have installed antiword – on Windows versions of Scribus this is already present. If the frame has content that you want to add to, use Append Text instead. While appending text works in both Select Item and Edit Contents modes, they both will append text at the end.
If you really do want to insert a file somewhere in the middle, append, then select the text in Edit Contents mode, cut, then paste at the point you wish it to go, while in Edit Contents mode or in Story Editor.
Plain text into an empty frame will use the default font settings for your text frames, which you can change in File > Preferences > Tools.
The idea of putting some kind of text indicator, or tag, at intervals in a text file in order to trigger some action when the file is read is elegant and has survived since the early days of computing. The purpose in Scribus would be to automatically cause the application of some edit to the text, most commonly a paragraph style. These tags can be anything you want, but should be a combination of easy to type, easy to find visually as you scan the file, and unique. This is why the suggestions you see on the wiki and the printed manual use 2–3 letter combinations, beginning with a backslash (\). On the textfile end of things you want to put these tags, let’s say \h1 and \h2, at the beginning of a paragraph which is to receive some style. Once you have saved the file, you then import it, initially no different than a plain text file, by using Get Text. You likely did not see it, but please now note the button labeled Automatic in the dialog. Clicking this shows a drop-down list, where you can find Text Filters as a choice. |
![]() |
![]() | |
On choosing Text Filters, and then selecting your file and pressing Ok, you now have a bit of work to do, since unless you have already created the specific actions based on your tags, you must do so now. For each tag you have a choice of Remove, Replace, or Apply as the action, and of course here we want to apply a style, but as you can imagine, we might also use this to remove or replace some text on import without altering the file itself. In this small example, we have set up a filter that we have named thesis by choosing to Apply a paragraph style, named header1 for paragraphs starting with our tag, \h1, and we will remove match (the \h1). Had we previously set up thesis, it could be chosen from the drop-down button in the upper right corner of the dialog. Similarly, if we have already created these styles, they could be chosen from a list where you see header1 and header2. We could delete an action by clicking on the “–” button, and add another with the “+” button. |
![]() |
Right-click on a frame to show its Context Menu, seen to the right. The layout has changed considerably with 1.5 versions of Scribus. If your frame has no content, some of these choices may not be present.
|
![]() |
Any multipage document is likely to need to link text from one page to the next. An automatic way of setting this up is when a new document is created. This graphic is from the lower right corner of the New Document dialog. We have set the Options for 4 pages initially, with 2-column frames (which will fill to the margins), and an 11-point gap between columns. Show Document Settings After Creation will bring up the Document Settings dialog after OK is clicked. You may freely edit the individual frames on pages afterward without losing your text linkage. Furthermore, if you add more pages to your document, they will also have these same linked frames. If you unlink somewhere in the middle, you will need to re-establish your linking pattern. |
![]() |
Begin with a text frame selected. Click the link icon, then click the next frame that your selected frame is to link to. If you have more frames you wish to link to, you need to click the icon again, then click the next frame in the series.
If your frame is one of a linked series of frames, clicking the unlink icon will show you the link(s) with arrows from one frame to the next. To unlink, click the frame after the arrow denoting the link to be broken. Note that all the subsequent links will be broken as well.
See also: