[Clipart] borders for printing flyers, announcements

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Alan Horkan <horkana at maths.tcd.ie> writes:

> There are some tricks you can do with gradients that will produce a
> frame around an image

You can also make a border out of a repeating pattern of individual
small images -- e.g., for a kindergarten theme you might use three or
four small images of ABC blocks repeated around the edge.

I agree it would be useful to have preformatted borders.  There should
be a keyword designated for these that they should all have in their
metadata.  I propose the keyword 'border'.  They could still have
other keywords as well.

Maybe we could make collecting borders an emphasis for a future
release, comparable to the summer and food w.

> Even though borders would be scalable it might help if you told us what
> specific page size you are targeting (although as a european I favour the
> A4 size page, but so long as the frame is carefully made it should scale
> alright).

For the US, the most obvious size to target is Letter size (8.5 x 11
inches).  A nice thing about this is that the same borders could be
scaled down for half-size (5.5 x 8.5 inches) and fit pretty well, as
long as they don't rely on bleeding *exactly* to the corners.

I don't think borders are used nearly so often on legal-sized
documents, much less 11x17 and other odd sizes.

> I have heard of people using OpenOffice.org for desktop publishing
> but I cannot believe it would be as good as Scribus.

I use OpenOffice.org and only miss *one* feature from PageMaker that I
really want (namely, a better UI for rotating things at angles other
than multiples of 90 degrees).  Also I don't know a way to make text
flow out of the end of one frame into the beginning of the next one,
but that's not a feature I've ever needed; I think Adobe included it
just for newspapers that like to do "story continued on page A-4"
stuff, which IMO is bad layout design anyway, as it makes people flip
back and forth unnecessarily many times.

Going the other way, PageMaker is missing *lots* of very handy
features that OpenOffice has in spades, not least of all tables.

Borders are generally more featureful in OO also, and more kinds of
objects can have them (including paragraphs, even).  And text
formatting is handled *much* better, especially for things like
bulleted lists, tab stops, and flowing text around other objects, such
as images and frames.  Columns also are handled better IMO in
OpenOffice.  And the PDF export in the latest version is very nice.

I experimented with Scribus a couple of months back and concluded that
at that time it wasn't mature enough for me, whereas OO.o is.  I'm
sure Scribus is improving with each release, though, and I've got it
on my list of apps to watch for future improvements.  I don't recall
what my specific gripes were.  I think maybe it didn't support
Automatic default colors (i.e., using the system colors for on-screen
editing but black-on-white for printing, unless the user sets the
colors to something different), which is an important accessibility
feature for me, since my eyes are rather more sensitive to light than
average and Evil Blinding White Backgrounds Must Die.  (Sodipodi has
this same problem; Inkscape is partway there with a
(not-very-discoverable) way to change the image background, so I can
change it to what I want for editing and change it back for exporting
to PNG.  This is not ideal, though, because it doesn't let me work in
my system foreground color while editing and have that come out black
later.  I've thought about writing a very short Perl script to
search-and-replace the SVG source...)

-- 
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