## 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:

- Document Setup will refer to the document being edited, and changes made for that document will be saved with the document and apply when it is re-opened. If you have no document open, you cannot select this dialog.
- Preferences in general changes settings for any future documents. It will be available whether or not you have any documents open. The following descriptions will primarily apply to Preferences, but we will point out differences compared with Document Setup as we go.

- General
- Document
- Guides
- Typography
- Tools
- Hyphenation
- Fonts
- Preflight Verifier

- Color Management
- PDF Export
- Document Item Attributes
- Table of Contents and Indexes
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Scrapbook

- Display
- External Tools
- Miscellaneous
- Plugins
- Short Words
- Scripter
- Document Information

### General (not present in Document Setup)

You may have started up Scribus in a particular Language – here we expect to see the system default language, but you can override that setting, which will remain on future startups until you change again.

The Theme will be whatever your main system theme is when none is selected, but otherwise your choices depend on your operating system or desktop environment and its available themes (if any). You can also change the size of the font used in the user interface. The various other settings are straightforward, and experimentation will be your guide.

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

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. The Page Size section should be easily understandable, with a large selection of standard sizes to choose from, in addition to Custom. The Document Layout choices have been the source of confusion for some. These simply apply to the relative placement of pages on your screen, and each will have the size as indicated, not some subdivision of it. Double Sided would typically be chosen for a book-like layout, and thus the First Page selector at the bottom allows the initial page to be Right or Left. This helps you use the appropriate Master Page layout.

| Here is an example of Double Sided, Right Page as the first (also happens to be two-column). If you print these on a local printer, they will print as individual pages.

Preset Layouts will be available for anything other than Single Page layout. What these represent are some time-honored ways to set the margins of the page, many based on some mathematical approach related to the dimensions of the page. Below we see the contrast of these various methods – these are all right pages of a double-sided layout.

Gutenberg | Magazine | Fibonacci | Golden Mean | Nine Parts

### Guides

Although labeled Guides, there are many other settings here, mostly related. Guides can either show above or below your content. Snapping: Snap Distance applies when Page > Snap to Guides or Page > Snap to Grid has been selected. Grab Radius has to do with the size of the virtual space for grabbing and dragging a frame’s handles. As the tooltips indicate, you must shut down and restart Scribus for these to take effect when they are changed.

This panel sets the default distances and colors, as well as the snap to settings. Baseline Grids is the set of horizontal guides which forces text in multiple columns to align horizontally, as shown below. Settings for the distances for baselines are in Paragraph Styles, as well as the next panel Typography

By default, Guides and Margins will show, but can be changed here, along with the color of each. Major and Minor Grids do not show by default – here we have changed the default colors so you can easily see the difference in the screenshot to the right, with page edges shown in red, margins in blue, major grid light green, and minor grid in light magenta.

Finally, at the bottom of the dialog we can choose to show the baseline grid by default, and adjust its default settings.

Find out more about the baseline grid in Working with Text.

### Typography

Here are the default settings for various typographic features – subscript, superscript, automatic line spacing and scaling of small capitals.

In addition, the amount of automatic linespacing can be adjusted relative to the size of the font. Note that the 20% is in addition to the space required for the next line of text, so that the total space from one baseline to the next would be 120% of the font size.

### Tools

In the Tools tab you can change the defaults for text and image frames, shapes and polygons, and lines. In addition, there are page magnification settings, plus the defaults for duplication and rotation of objects.

### 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.

### Preflight Verifier

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

### Color Management

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

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.

### 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.

New to Scribus 1.4.x is the inclusion of the ability to create bleeds, crop marks, and other printer marks as you export to PDF. Any bleed width is added to the page dimensions you selected when you created your document. Note here an example of what you see when you do not have ICC profiles installed – PDF/X-3 Output Intent is not available.

### Documents 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 and Indexes

These two subdialogs relate to each other. One use of these features is explained here: http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Creating_a_Table_of_Contents

### Keyboard Shortcuts

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.

### 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 rescale 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 Tools > Zoom.

The Colors tab allows for customization of the colors used for various screen features, such as marking the margins, grids, and guides. 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.

#### Ghostscript

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

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

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.

Render Frames

See Working with Render Frames.

### Miscellaneous

### 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.

### 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:

- Linux/UNIX: `/home/username/.scribus`
- Mac OS X: `User/username/.scribus`
- OS/2 and eComStation: `X:\SCRIBUS-1.4.x-OS2-date\scribus\.scribus`
- Windows: `C:\Documents and Settings/username/.scribus`

Within the directory are a `.scribus14.rc` file, a `scribusfont.rc` file (which preserves your font preferences) and a `prefs14.xml` file. 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. If you are encountering any issues with a previously working Scribus installation, renaming, not deleting, the `.scribus` directory may be a good idea. See the notes on Troubleshooting for more information.

See also

- Font Setup
- Hyphenation
- Document Information
- Short Words Plug-in
- Managing Colors
- Working with Render Frames