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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?"
Does it answer this one?
/. post, too.
What the hell is it?
Might have been nice to mention that in the
Will not compile on GCC 2.95.. That really limits its use a lot doesnt it?
I used Scribus about a year ago to produce a professional looking poster for a conference. At the time, it was a very powerful program with a few small quirks. I would recommend it to anybody somewhat familiar with DTP.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
(Note: I'm not complaining, just hoping aloud =)
Scribus is an excellent application. I could easily put it in the same category as Mozilla Firefox, XEmacs, GIMP, Blender, Audacity and Eclipse as an example of well-engineered open source application that is good enough to get any real work done.
Scribus is, however, a little bit of a quirk-express. The user interface is not yet completely free of small things that tend to be annoying. For one thing, it's slow (though nowhere near as slow as some pre-1.0 versions - and Freetype integration has greatly helped with this too, with faster and better-looking font rendering) and some details lag behind (the property dialog could use some really heavy improvements).
I think the UI situation is just similar to GIMP 1.0 - it took until 1.2 until the UI was really good and until 2.0 until it was superb. Yet, like GIMP 1.0, it's completely usable for what it's designed for!
So, in conclusion, I'll be hoping that we'll get into the "GIMP 1.2" level soon what comes to the UI. It is really good as it is right now, though.
What's interesting is that Sodipodi (that other vector drawing program) means "to scribble" in Estonian.
Well, um, it can take bitmap images in various formats (JPEGs, PNGs, the other usual stuff - not GIMP's xcf format, which nobody uses anyway). That's all that's needed to integration, really =)
Apparently Scribus 1.2 will allow people to launch GIMP to directly edit an image from Scribus, and some other support may be planned for later...
What I really appreciate more is the really freaking cool ability to import SVG vector files into Scribus-editable objects (unless I misinterpreted when I did this last time, which was coincidentally the first time for me =)
There seems to be nothing like this [collection of templates] at all for scribus (in fact, by and large the range of templates available for OS office applications is pretty woeful).
I can't speak for Scribus, but when I grab a form from Office {Max, Depot}, I look for where it says "equivalent of Avery XXXX," head over to the Avery web site, click on the template for XXXX, and OO opens it quite nicely. (Of course, a version change in MS Word with associated format change for templates can trivially break this.)
I just want to use this forum to thank the developers of scribus for this fine app.
I did some desktop publishing back in school with Adobe Pagemaker, but I don't have a usable Windoze box around anymore. So last fall I checked if there were any desktop publishing tools for Linux available when I wanted to create a "birthday paper" for my dad's 60's birthday.
apt-get install scribus
And the program had everything I needed and not a single thing too much. It was usable without much learning and I was able to produce a profesional looking paper practically over the weekend.
It even had support for automatic hipernation in German language.
How about the ability to import/export files with FrameMaker's Maker Interchange Format (MIF) format? Lots of Linux documentation is written with DocBook which can be rendered to MIF using OpenJade.
IMHO, the ability to import MIF files and tidy up their page layouts before the final render/print would make this a killer app. Other page layout programs may able to import MIF files so exporting this format would be helpful.
Also, how about an English language manual?
Now I finally got 1.1.6 installed on my Solaris box.
For all Solaris users:
Regarding the error on line 139 in scribus/seiten.h:
(parse error before numeric constant)
The code on line 139 is:
QCheckBox* DS;
On Solaris, and possibly on many other Unix System V Implementations, DS is already defined if something includes signal.h; to fix this error, place the following line into seiten.h (right after the #include statements):
#undef DS
I compiled Scribus on an Intel Platform Edition machine, which is a little-endian architecture. After installing Scribus, i got the following error:
xlib_rgb_init: compiled for big endian, but this is a little endian machine.
I tried a lot of modifications in gdk-pixbuf*.[ch] and in config.h to make it work, but it always starts up with a white page that turns red after about 1/4 second. If I choose red as background color for the page, the page turns darkgreen. Combinations of red and blue work, combinations of blue and green do also work.
I don't know what's wrong with the colors, but to me it seems like the developers of Scribus really messed up a lot of things regarding big-endian/little-endian dependent computations (I wonder where you need such computations in your code, when you just want to view an empty page.)
So, it theoretically works. Practically it doesn't, because the color computations are broken...