Designing Labels and Cards with Scribus (Open Source)Scribus is free software page- layout tool applicable to designing all sort of documents: from newspaper ads to fliers to whole books. Because it can precisely position both images and text, it is also the preferred type of tool for designing mailing labels and business cards. A word processor has weaker features for working with pictures and other graphical elements, while a Photoshop- like image editor makes changing text an unnecessary pain. To get started with Scribus, download the latest installer for your operating system. Designing a sheet of labels is a straightforward process with Scribus: you import the proper template, lay out one label the way you want it, then duplicate your creation to fill the rest of the slots on the template.
To get the best results, however, you will need to make use of some specific Scribus features: layers, text styles, and export options. Start by downloading a template of the label or card sheet you need. Scribus can import EPS and PDF (among other formats); EPS is simpler, so if in doubt, try it first. Within Scribus, create a new document of the appropriate page size (paying particular attention to landscape/portrait orientation). You can set the margin guides to zero for all four sides when creating a new document; you won’t need regular page margins because the template already dictates where the content will go. Once Scribus opens your new blank document, visit the “Page” menu and check the “Snap to Guides” option — this will keep everything orderly when making multiple copies of your layout. Now choose “File” - > “Import” - > “Get Vector File” from the menu bar.
- According to the developers, Scribus is the only open source page layout application which runs natively on all 3 major desktop operating systems; Linux, MacOSX and Windows. Scribus also runs on Unix
- I have a 72.9MB PDF file that I need to shrink into under 500KB. The file was a JPEG image that I had scanned, and then converted to pdf.
Choose the template you downloaded in the file browser; the mouse cursor will change to a folded- newspaper shape to indicate that wherever you click on the page, the imported file will be placed. Click in the upper- left- hand corner of the page. You are likely to miss the absolute corner by a few pixels; just open up the Properties window from the “Windows” menu. This important palette allows you to view and adjust all sort of content properties in your document.
Author Topic: PDF doesn't print properly, but looks fine in Print Preview (Read 11697 times). Scribus (32-bit) Version 1.4.6 Create professional looking document layouts with this free alternative to Adobe InDesign.
PDF-XChange Viewer; Developer(s) Tracker Software Products: Initial release: June 21, 2007 (2007-06-21) Stable release. Brynn wrote:No, in Inkscape, changing the DPI in the Export Bitmap dialog only changes the size of the image, not the quality. To keep the exported image at the same size, keep the DPI at 90. If you need to change the quality. Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) has become a standard format for sharing high quality digital documents. Unfortunately, many PDF readers only support a minimal set of tools for editing, annotating, or otherwise. Out of all the common file types found in our computing world, PDF is probably one of the most restrictive ones, while at the same time being available for everyone to use (primarily to read). Indeed, the world of.
The “X, Y, Z” tab features geometry: you can manually set the X and Y position of the template to 0 for a precise fit. Next you should add some horizontal and vertical guides to help keep things in position. Create a new guide by clicking in the rulers above and beside the workspace and dragging in to the image.
By zooming in, you can very precisely position your guides to exactly fit the label locations of your template. Finally, choose “Windows” - > “Layers” from the menu bar. The Layers window allows you to create and shuffle multiple layers in your document, just as many image editing programs do. The just- imported template is in the default layer “Background; ” click on the plus button to add a new layer — in which you will create your content without fear of accidentally bumping the template out of the way. DESIGN! Now you can get to work, adding text, lines, shapes, and images to your label design. Text, naturally, is the most important part of the design: if it is not readable, the postal service will not deliver mail, contacts won’t be able to read your phone number, employees won’t know what is stored in what file, and so forth.
Nevertheless, Scribus can make your cards or labels look good in addition to being functional. Let’s start by working with images. Choose “Insert” - > “Insert Image Frame” from the menu bar, or click the “Insert Image Frame” icon on the toolbar. You can click and drag the image frame anywhere on the page. You can grab the side or corner handles on the frame and resize it.
Right- click on the frame, and from the context menu choose “Get Image,” then find the image file you want to insert. Once you have selected your image, look at the Properties panel. In addition to the “X, Y, Z” tab, the “Shape” and “Image” tabs give you some important options.
Shape allows you to change the shape of the frame (e. Image gives you more exact control over the size and dimensions of the image display; here you can precisely adjust the positioning of the image within the frame (such as to crop off the top), adjust the horizontal and vertical scaling, and change the DPI setting — an adjustment that will only affect the final output, of course, not the preview that you work with in Scribus itself. Lines and shapes are just as important as images in many professional designs.
You can have Scribus create a wide variety of line styles, and adjust their width, endpoint behavior, and color. Shapes are graphical elements like lines, not layout elements like image frames. The vast majority of the time, you will use shapes to insert solid- color or gradient rectangles, but Scribus can render all sorts of polygons, stars, arrows, and flowchart- like graphics as well. To make a simple gradient, click on the “Insert Shape” toolbar button, then draw a rectangle on your label. You will notice that it is solid black, unlike the transparency of an empty text or image frame.
Here again, you can turn to the Properties palette to adjust the shape to fit your needs. In this case, the “Colors” tab comes into play; from there you can change the line and fill color of the rectangle. The drop- down box allows you to switch between solid color and seven varieties of color gradient. When you have designed one label to your satisfaction, copy and paste it into all of the other slots of the template. The best thing to do is to select all of the graphical elements at once, then hit Crtl- G to group them together.
Thus when you make copies, you can move the copies together without accidentally getting any elements misaligned via a stray mouse click. The guide lines you created earlier will make sure everything is aligned perfectly. TEXT WITH STYLE(s)With the background and graphical elements of your design done, create a new layer in which to edit the text elements of your work. Make sure that your text layer is the topmost layer.
For basic text, all you have to do is insert a text frame: choose “Insert” - > “Insert Text Frame” from the menu bar. To edit the contents of the frame, click on the “Edit Text” button or choose “Edit” - > “Edit Text” from the menus. What pops up is the Story Editor, a light- weight word processor that makes it easier to work on the copy inside even if it is to be displayed in a small font or wrapped around some irregular graphics. More importantly, the Story Editor allows you to use paragraph styles. You can highlight individual words or phrases and change their typeface, size, and character style in the Story Editor, but for text that you will re- use — as on a sheet of labels or cards — using paragraph styles makes making adjustments far easier.
The left- hand column of the Story Editor is a drop- down menu where you can choose the style of the adjoining paragraph. Left- click on it and choose “Edit Styles” to bring up the Style Manager. If you only plan to use one font element, you can stick with editing the Default Paragraph Style, but if you have a company logo, address, and potentially other text that you want to keep distinct from one another, use the “New” button to create a style for each. Now, instead of altering the font size, spacing, color, and other details of the text in the Story Editor, change them in the Style Manager, then select the updated style in the drop- down box in the Story Editor. You can quickly see the advantage of this approach if you drag the Style Manager out of the way of the document window and use the “Apply” button to make changes to the selected style: your changes will be updates instantly in the document.
Thus you can systematically increase or decrease the font size until it fits, adjust the colors, or test out different type faces, all with a few simple clicks. It might not seem like a tremendous advantage while you work on a single label, but try this: select all of the text frames, and make duplicates of them for the rest of your sheet. Now you can see how much simpler it is to use styles: change the paragraph style once, and all of the copies are updated. EXPORT LIKE AN EXPERTOnce your text is in and formatted to your satisfaction, pause and think for a second about printing.
When printing a sheet of cards or labels, you don’t want to print the outlines of the PDF or EPS template that you imported in the first step. In some instances you might want to print both the graphics and the text, but in other situations you might not. Return address labels, for example, will all be the same.
For other labels you might want to print the graphics all at once (perhaps on the nice, full- color printer), then print one or two labels at a time with different text. Luckily, because you placed your template, graphics, and text in different layers, Scribus makes it simple to do so. Bring up the Layers window. There are five checkboxes next to each layer in the list, allowing you to individually control whether the layer is shown on screen (helpful for tweaking highly complicated documents), printed, locked or unlocked (to prevent accidental changes), subject to “text flow” around objects from other layers, and displayed in full or in wireframe mode. Uncheck the “Print Layer” box for the templates layer, and the outlines will not be printed. To print a stack of labels with the graphics but no text, uncheck the text layer. Later, you can re- check text and un- check graphics to print addresses without doubling- up on the graphics.
Clearly, if you only want to print a single label, you will have to have more fine- grained control than at the layer level alone. For each object in the document (frame, shape, or even group), you can individually disable or enable printing via the “X, Y, Z” tab in the Properties window. The toggle button depicts a printer, just as it does in the Layers window.
Best Free Windows 6. Software. Windows 6. Software Index. Select a Software Category: New and Updated Software. Check out what's new: March 2.
The index has been converted to a new format. The content will be updated in April. September 2. 01. 4 - Internet and email: Items added or updated: Web Browser: Google Chrome, Google Chrome, rewrote the category. Image Tools: Items added or updated: CAD Program: Blender. August 2. 01. 4 - Image Tools: Items added or updated: Paint program: Krita, My. Paint. Image Optimizer: RIOTAbout. This list of the best software for 6.
Windows has 5. 4 sub- categories with 8. To quickly find what you want, select a Software Category on the top of this page or use the box below to view all items in one massive list.
Read more about 6. Windows by following the links in the related articles. Normally the products will have a review in the corresponding freeware categories so I will provide an excerpt from that review.
Other comments will usually relate to 6. The primary goal of this article is to find the best native 6.
Where there is no 6. Windows ( ). These 3. Windows users. Although we do mention Windows XP Pro 6. Windows Vista, 7 or 8. If you would like to give something back to the freeware community by taking it over, check out this page for more details.
You can then contact us from that page or by clicking here. Back to the top of the page Best Free Windows 6. Audio and Video. Multimedia applications are generally popular and interesting so it is no surprise that there are several excellent 6. Best Free Windows 6. Audio Editor. Audacity.
As far as physical drive space goes, Audicity is a small installation, but an immensely powerful one. Really though, track editing is just the tip of the iceberg with this application: it's functionality for editing is balanced with it's equally powerful functionality for recording, and also applying effects and modifications to existing audio tracks. With Infra. Recorder, you can burn and create images with support for bootable discs, author rewritable discs, and create audio CDs and video DVDs. The interface is clean and simple without a lot of extras to make things confused. For example, sometimes the instruction to insert a particular disk is in its own pop- up window but other times it will be in the title of the current one.
If you read other users' comments you will see that they either love it because it works flawlessly or hate it because it converts their disks into coasters. It seems likely that CDRTools has problems working with some burners which would explain why I had consistent problems on my test system . Even so, I still recommend that you try it out because it is native 6. Imgburn. Imgburn . The welcome menu provides quick access to some common tasks, but other basic features such as erasing a re- writable disc are not immediately visible.
It also allows you to create CD/DVD images from CDs/DVDs and save them into various formats including ISO, BIN/CUE, NRG, UIF. This program with a simple interface supports up to 1. Other features are available such as compress ISO, NRG, CUE, MDS and CCD formats into UIF format, or decompress UIF format into ISO format. The feature for burning images to disks is not supported. Despite the slow speeds it transcodes .
However, if you have a graphics driver installed that supports Open GL, it will take a rather small fraction of time to transcode the content. Handbrake produces an MPEG- 4 file which is compatible with a wide range of media players. Note that you’ll need to have the right codecs installed for the type of file you wish to convert. For many of us the most useful feature is the .
It also provides numerous video and audio parameter settings for advanced users to alter the file size and video quality accordingly. So it can rip some but not all DVDs. Best Free Windows 6. Media Centre. XBMC. Point to a folder containing your files, indicate what type of files there are (Movies, TV Shows, etc.) and XBMC does the rest. It scans all subfolders and files and downloads all relevant information (text, thumbnails, sounds, etc) from the Internet. Instead you have to type in a time position via the keyboard.
Don't ask me why the simplest media player can do that but most of the Media Center Software cannot. Some may call it KMPlayer.
Redux with more stability and versatility. It includes a long list of built- in audio and video codecs that enable you to play almost any media format you can dream about. Pot. Player has a simple and sleek interface though not mind- blowing and has high quality playback. The player is light on system resources and has a very fast startup. It can also use the Quick. Time and the Real.
Player architectures (if installed on the computer) to play their native files. To further extend its functionality while avoiding the installation of Real. Player, Win. Amp and Quicktime, you will have to download some codec packs. This means that it can be run from your USB flash drive as well as your hard drive.
Much of that bloat seems to arise from Apple's distrust of Windows which showed in the need to bring almost everything with i. Tunes except the kitchen sink.
On the positive side, if you are going to run 'bloatware' then you're much better off doing it on a 6. I happily admit to being a long- time user of i. Tunes. All my children use it and it works very well with the media player on my non- Apple cell phone. Over several years of use I've had no problems with it and I'm not exasperated by any of its much- maligned issues (e. I use Autoruns to stop the unneeded applications).
This new version has improved slightly but you won't see it in the interface. Second, I no longer need Quick. Time. Third, for the 3. Best Free Windows 6. Music Creator. LMMS. There are so many instruments and effects to choose from . It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.
You can also save and restore the position of desktop icons and, optionally, hide and restore icons by clicking on the desktop. In order to use Iconoid to change the colour of text you must first turn off drop shadows for icon text. It also allows you to convert your favorite images to icons, or icons to images. Conversion between Macintosh and Windows icons are supported. Other features include supporting Vista icons with PNG compression, true color, transparency (alpha channel) and batch processing capability. Ico. FX allows you to create icon libraries, extract and patch icons inside the executable files. However, on some executable files which I tried, the former seems work better than the latter.
Resource usage information is available for the CPU(s), memory, disk and network. The level of detail that can be viewed means Resource Monitor is more closely related to the Process Explorer/Process Monitor tools from Sys. Internals than it is Task Manager. Unlike Process Explorer/Process Monitor, you don't have to be overwhelmed by detail, since you can view information in a way that suits you. To try out Resource Monitor, click on Start, type resource monitor into the search box, and then click on the Resource Monitor entry that appears under Programs. For an in depth look at Resource Monitor refer to our article Windows 7 Resource Monitor: New & Improved. Problem Steps Recorder.
Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) allows the steps needed to reproduce a problem, or to implement a fix, to be recorded and saved to a file. If you've ever tried to help a friend or family member over the phone, or via email, with a PC problem I'm sure you know how difficult and frustrating it can be. PSR helps a lot. To start PSR, click on Start, type psr. Programs, or right click and choose Run as a administrator. Note you need to choose Run as administrator if any of the screens you wish to capture are running with administrator privilege. Once loaded you simply click on the red circular Start Record button to start capturing user activity. Comments can be added during the capture and to finish the session you simply click on the Stop Record button.
Once recording has stopped you will be prompted to enter a filename and the whole session will be saved to a ZIP file. The maximum number of screen shots that can be recorded by default is 2. To change this, click on the downward arrow at the right hand end of the PSR dialog box and choose Settings. The ZIP contains a MHT, mime encoded HTML, format document that includes the screen shots, any comments that were added, and a text based description of the actions that were carried out. This can be opened and edited in any version of Word from 2. Alternatively, the file can be viewed using the free Word Viewer, Internet Explorer version 5 or higher, Firefox with the Un. MHTextension installed and Opera version 9.
PSR is not a ground breaking application, but it will help me to assist others much more quickly and efficiently. Power. Shell. Power. Shell is Microsoft's solution for automating system tasks. Version 1 was released with Windows Vista and version 2 with WIndows 7. It has two main parts, a command- line shell and a scripting language.
Power. Shell is the equivalent of the DOS commands and batch files used in early PCs. Naturally it is much more powerful because we now have GUI interfaces and other new features. It is fully integrated with the . NET framework so all Power.
Shell objects are . NET objects. This provides a powerful ability to interact with your system through: 'cmdlets', . NET programs compiled into a dynamic- link library and loaded by a Power.
Shell script; Power. Shell scripts (. ps. Power. Shell functions; and executable programs. To try out Power. Shell, click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, Windows Power.
Shell, and select Windows Power. Shell which will bring up the Power. Shell command line interface. If you want to create scripts then see How to open Windows 7 Power. Shell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE). If you want to see how useful it is then run the script from Auditing 3. Bit and 6. 4- Bit Applications with Power.