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Scribus 1.1.6 Reviewed
TrialOfFire points out MadPenguin's review (with helpful screenshots) of Scribus 1.1.6, which attempts to answer "what is Scribus really like? Can anyone just pick it up and use it? Is it really as powerful as they say it is? And does it live up to the hype surrounding it?"
Here's a quick review talking about the enhancements since the last version.
What the hell is it?
from the Scibus site:
1.1 What is Scribus?
Scribus is a desktop page layout program in the tradition of Corel Ventura®, Quark Xpress®, PageMaker® and InDesign®
Since its launch in the spring of 2001, Scribus 1.+ offers Linux and Unix users a versatile and user friendly page layout application. Scribus 1.0 and its recent development versions are being used in a number of ways; from brochure design to newsletters and posters to technical documentation. Scribus has the type of the features one would expect in a sophisticated page layout application. You can do all the typical tasks like precision placing and rotating of text and/or images on a page, specify manual kerning of type and much more. With the release of Scribus 1.0, Linux and Unix users now have one more high quality application for the desktop, making it the premier choice for DTP on Linux or BSD with other platforms to come.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color and a simple color management system to soft proof images destined for high quality color printing, Other features include flexible PDF creation options, PDF Import, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of 4 color separations. Scribus also supports via freetype Unicode text including right to left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.
Graphic formats which can be placed in Scribus include Encapsulated Post Script (eps), TIFF(Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), Portable Network Graphics (png) and XPixMap(xpm) Scribus now also handles any bit map file type supported by QT3.
Printing, PDF and SVG creation are via custom driver libraries and plug-ins, giving Scribus inventive features: the abilities to include presentation effects with PDF output, fully scriptable interactive PDF forms, SVG vector file output. The internal printer drivers fully support Level 2 and Level 3/PDF 1.4 postscript features including transparency and font embedding. The PDF driver from Scribus can embed fonts for postscript printing and you can use and output high resolution EPS files.
Other useful features include manual kerning of type, rotating object frames, bezier curves polygons, precision placement of objects, layering with RGB and CMYK custom colors. The Scribus document file format is XML, an open source standard file format, a super set of SGML. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents, can be recovered with a simple text editor - sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs.
When run from KDE , Drag and Drop is enabled. Thus, for example you can drag and drop from the desktop to the canvas easily. There is easy to use drag and drop scrapbook, which can contain frequently used items including text blocks, pictures and custom shaped frames. Scribus will also run most any window manager including Gnome and Blackbox without difficulties.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
Even the google cache copy seems inaccessible.. Here is the Freshmeat Project Page for Scribus 1.1.6, and I also have a link to the home page
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Seun Osewa's Afriguru.com grows daily.
Here's some "useful" info: Scribus - Layout program similar to Adobe PageMaker
Basically:
"Scribus is a Layout program for GNU/Linux®, similar to Adobe® PageMaker(TM), QuarkXPress(TM) or Adobe® InDesign(TM), except that it is published under the GNU GPL. Currently, it is still in its early stages of development, but rapidly maturing and very useable. Already, it has the ability to layout newsletters, create corporate stationery, small posters and other documents which need flexible layout and/or the ability to output to professional quality imagesetting equipment. You can do all the typical tasks like placing and rotating text and/or images on a page, specify manual kerning of type and much more. While the goals of the program are for ease of use and simple easy to understand tools, Scribus offers support for professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, easy PDF creation, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of color separations. Graphic formats which can be placed include Ecapsulated Post Script (eps), Joint Photographic Experts Group (jpeg), Portable Network Graphics (png) and XPixMap(xpm)."
According to this review the usability of this product is only 2 stars out of 5. Seems like poor usability and linux-based products will go hand in hand for a long time.
:)
Oh it sounds like it's a perfect drop-in replacement for QuarkXPress
For all its excellence with output (and when I used it, it worked well) Quark is certainly not an example of brilliant, or even good UI design. Takes a lot of time and a lot of knowledge of the little hidden and non-obvious keycommands to use well.
Scribus is regularly (almost daily) tested with high end printers RIPS and printing hardware. We have DTP professionals using and testing for us in the US, Canada, France and Germany.
EPS and PDFs from Scribus are usable in any DTP program (including Adobe apps such as Illustrator) can load and use such files. Scribus can also directly print to the hardware.
Reviewer says little cms is for producing PDFs. No, its for colour management! Scribus has its own PDF exporter.
All distros with any sense use 3.0+. 2.9x is too old and too buggy to bother with. With 3.0 we get a better compiler producing a faster executable, and is able to handle C++ templates much better. We made the decision a few 4+ minor versions ago, way back in October 03.
More screenshots here.
That is the older one. The new one is Scribus Home Page
Replying to myself to correct a few omissions and corrections:
My personal view of the reviews of Scribus:
Unfortunately, we have yet to see a review of Scribus by someone who has used professional DTP applications. As a IT/DTP consultant, even though I am a member of the team, my testing with professional DTP pre-flight tools has consistently shown Scribus creates PDF and PS output which most certainly equals and sometimes exceeds those of commercial apps.
Lastly, DTP is itself a complex subject and takes time to master. The "Wizard" approach of other apps really dumbs down the true capabilities of an app like Scribus, just like it would Blender, GIMP or any other similar type of application.