How to work efficiently with Scribus' Story Editor?

Question

When working in Scribus' story editor, I still wonder how to enter text efficiently. As far as I can see, whenever I hit enter, a new paragraph gets created. Hereafter I have to manually select the paragraph's style in the left panel. When I have many lines, this seems to get complicated, especially when I want to assign a new style to several paragraphs. Afaik, I have to change each and every paragraph on its own.

How to get around that problem? And what is the meaning of the red star that you can see in my last line? Is it newline without new paragraph? That would totally make sense to me, yet I cannot find anything in the Scribus official wiki...

(Sorry, can't add pictures as I am a newbie...)

Answer 1

In the story editor, select all the paragraphs you would like to assign a style at once and then use the style-drop-down-box in the top-right corner.

This works much better than clicking on the left which does only one paragraph at once.

Answer 2

A way around here would be to… not to use story editor to assign paragraph styles. This is better done in WYSIWYG editor, by selecting required range of paragraphs and assigning proper style to them via „Properties” palette.

Style assignment can also be done by directly editing *.sla file, which BTW is plain XML. There are many ways to do it. If you're tech savvy enough, you'll know what I mean, if not you probably don't want to dive-in, unless you need to process textual data en masse. In that case — ask away :).

About the “red star” – you're absolutely right. That's symbol of “newline without new paragraph” or, as it rather should be called, mark of a “forced line break”. This can be extremely useful in typesetting e.g. poetry or song lyrics.

Some other characters, like e.g. forced frame break, forced column break, or non breaking space, also are marked in story editor with their own, red colored, symbols.