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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?"
who recently proclaimed Scribus to be one of "Free Software's Killer Applications"
Oh yes yes sure... but when will they learn? the *only* free software killer application is here. And I should know, it very nearly killed me.
Oh and by the way, I'm sure it can do desktop publishing too some way or another...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Does it answer this one?
/. post, too.
What the hell is it?
Might have been nice to mention that in the
"what is Scribus really like?"
What about the more common question: "what is Scribus"? The uninformative summary doesn't help; neither does the slashdotted site.
Here's a quick review talking about the enhancements since the last version.
Spoken like a man who's never had to use Quark Xpress.
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"
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
____________________
Seun Osewa's Afriguru.com grows daily.
...if it included a good text editor.
They added JPEG support in this version. Time to close down the project.
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.
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!
DTP
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
In all of the languages that I can understand, words have vowels in them.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Scribus appears to be a decent desktop publishing tool. I've installed it but personally I prefer to use the OOo drawing tool for mockups, and our graphist uses QuarkXpress for the final designs.
The point is that printshops accept files only with specific formats, namely with CMYK color separation, the appropriate resolution, and in "well-known" file formats: Quark, Illustrator, et al.
A Linux desktop publishing program that can product color-separated files in the correct format can be a dog to learn and use, that'd be fine! As long as it can produce print-ready files, a painful learning curve is not an issue.
The UI is not the key. Business usefulness is the key.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"Scribus is a Page Layout program for GNU/Linux®, similar to Adobe® PageMaker, QuarkXPress or Adobe® InDesign, except that it is published under the GNU GPL.
With the release of Scribus 1.1.6, Linux and Unix desktop users have a user friendly, but powerful Desktop Publishing application capable of a broad set of DTP needs. Started with humble beginnings as a Python program to make menus, Scribus has been transformed into a young but rapidly maturing DTP application with numerous professional features, as well as some unique capabilities. Already, in use from everything to club newsletters to small newspaper production to animated interactive PDF presentations a la Power point. or Open Office Impress. Other uses are creating corporate stationery and brochures, small posters and other documents which need flexible layout and/or the ability to output to professional quality image-setting equipment."
Thanks to TrialOfFire's retarded news post they have been slashdotted by lots of people just trying to find out what the fuck the program is/does.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
(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.
How appropriate! Seeing the website is broken via slasdotting - a post nuke website, so to speak.
Scribus looks like an okay program, and I'm sure that for printing office types who have the time to learn to use it properly it does a fine job. However there's an opportunity to make it a real "killer app" for far more people. Consider Microsoft Publisher. It's an okay sort of program - what makes it very useful for a lot of people is the vast template library which makes it very easy to get 90% of the way towards (say) a double-sided 3-panel sales brochure in about 5 minutes, requiring only that the default background is changed and perhaps some minor details altered. The templates are even themeable.
There seems to be nothing like this at all for scribus (in fact, by and large the range of templates available for OS office applications is pretty woeful). We really ought to get on top of this as a priority; otherwise MS Office will still have a massive lead in terms of useability to Joe Officeworker.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
What's interesting is that Sodipodi (that other vector drawing program) means "to scribble" in Estonian.
Any good printshop can take and print a PDF. They can even tweak the colours if it is needed.
See my journal, I write things there
The main power of Quark Express is in its shortcuts. Experienced DTP users can set up a page blazingly fast, and in less than 5mins the have a full doc setup through mostly keystrokes. That`s the main reason why a lot of them whine when the shortcuts change between versions, and that`s why more than a lot stick with older versions of a program if the newer ones have "changed stuff" (Quark5 being a prime example, as far as they tell me). For a different program to have success in this field, there mustn`t exist only a nice interface but a similarity with the most well known "players". How different is it from Quark and Pagemaker? Can it be configured to work in a similar way? Its widgets are not its main power, proper seperations, SMYC and RGB support, similarity to other apps are what can make it succesfull.
Link: Scribus Screen Shot Gallery
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 =)
For those of us Gnome diehards, there's Passepartout. Since I've no use for DTP, I've no idea if it is, or has the potential to be, anywhere as good as Scribus.
Also, bad thing the Gnome LyX frontend stalled...
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
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.
Scribus can import spot colors via EPS, as well as DCS 2.0 files. Support for Pantone requires licensing the Pantone libraries.
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?
We aplogize for this happening. We've been tweaking the server and software every time this happens, but nothing is working so we are going to move away from PostNuke (which is inevitably our Slashdot weakness). Once again, I apologize, it hurts our credibility and I know it, so the next time you see us here... well... you'll actually SEE us here :)
Linux with kernel panic...
MadPenguin.org
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...