Category: Software you should try.

Scribus: Desktop publishing software at no licensing cost - part 1

Years ago, while publishing a magazine for my school, I tried various applications for desktop publishing and complex documents editing. At that time there was PageMaker, Publisher, and a few others. At some point I also tried QuarkXPress, all of them having ups and downs either for a newbie or for a professional to tell about. Some were more user friendly, some delivered more control over content, allowing creation of more complex layout documents.

I am not in the publishing business. But recently I needed to make my own complex brochures and some catchy flyers and it wasn’t worthing to buy a DTP application license just for that. Therefore I started investigating the free options available out there on the market. This is how I came accross an Open Source application initially developed for Linux and now available for Windows and Mac too, named SCRIBUS - www.scribus.net.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover a full desktop publishing application which tends to resemble QuarkXPress - the choice of many newspapers editors. It allows you to create great looking documents of all kinds and if you have a background in desktop publishing or if you are familiar with the specific concepts you will almost feel like home.

NOW: What is desktop publishing?
Quoting wikipedia, desktop publishing (also known as DTP) combines a personal computer and page layout software to create publication documents on a computer for either large scale publishing or small scale local economical multifunction peripheral output and distribution.

OK. This might sound too abstract for some. Let’s put it this way:
How many of you out there have tried to create a complex document like for instance a flyer or a brochure with say Microsoft’s Word ? Sometimes you managed to do it, especially with templates, and sometimes you didn’t. When I tried Word, even if it has the ability to do many of the things needed by such a task, too many times when I went to printing I discovered that the layout of the document has broken and it does not look the way I intended anymore. And if the document is very long and contains many pictures and complex graphics and tables, then the pain of putting it back all together is huge.

On the other side, press-ready DTP layout applications like Scribus give you tight control over the content, it’s positioning on the page, it’s effects, colours, etc. More than that, it makes sure that you deliver it to printing exactly the way you intended it.

It has the ability to create and apply templates to pages - making it easy to create similar pages in a long document, text styles management - allowing easy text formatting, it allows linking text frames together so that the text flows from one frame to another, it supports professional publishing features such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

The PDF creation feature which also exists in another open source office application OpenOffice.org is a big win for you at no cost. Now that you can create the complex documents you need in a free program, you are assured that they stay the way you made them while delivering to printing by exporting them to PDF.

Quoting an article from the TechNewsWorld: “Although Scribus is designed for professionals who want to produce “press ready” documents, an amateur can pick up the program’s essentials with a minimum of effort.”

Being open source and free of charge it costs nothing else than a download for you to try it. You can find it here: http://www.scribus.net/.

Here are some links to existing tutorials on the web to get ou started with Scribus:

Hope this helps. If you find more resources on Scribus or wrote your own, please let me know in a comment here.

Written by cdriga on October 12th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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