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A Look At Scribus
Scribus 1.3.3.1 “Printemps” is in the wild, the most polished version of the FOSS page layout engine yet. Is it good enough to base your workflow on…
Scribus 1.3.3.1 “Printemps” is in the wild, the most polished version of the FOSS page layout engine yet. Is it good enough to base your workflow on?
The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement seems to be all about giving the public at large alternatives. So far there are alternatives to commonly available operating systems (the multplicitous Linuxen), Inkscape for vector drawing, The GIMP for image editing, and OpenOffice.org for office productivity, the majority of which can be had for free (or nearly so).
The FOSS contribution to layout is an application called Scribus. Striving of offer high-end layout capability on a par with Adobe and Quark’s products, it originally ran on Linux and now runs on OS X and Windows. With an interface that trades on some of the same paradigms that InDesign and QuarkXPress, it touts advanced PDF output. Is it worthy alternative to the big guns?
We aim to take a general overview of Scribus here. While we will state our impressions this is intended as less than a review but more than a mere evaluation. This is a general look round with an eye toward hitting some high points.
About Scribus
Scribus is, as stated before, a page layout application. Users of InDesign and QuarkXPress will recognize the paradigm pretty much right away; it uses boxes (frames) to contain text and images, and has tools for manipulating the content that work in similar ways.
Scribus provides for printing, touts PDF output (including PDF/X, for which claim is made that they were the first widely available layout application to do so), CMYK and RGB color models, and an amount of bells and whistles that ought to satisfy most DTP customers.
The interface can look a variety of ways, including themes for Motif, SGI, Windows, and Mac Aqua, which are easily settable in the Preferences.
Installing, Running, and Getting Support
Initially Scribus was developed for Linux, and depended on X Windows, which required a fair amount of hackerly mojo to install. Not impossible by any means, but definitely, as any OSS in development can be, not for the faint of heart.
With the advent of native versions for Win and Mac OS X, however, installation is much simpler. In the case of OS X, it was necessary to use Fink for the most efficient and end-user-friendly install, but with the newest, more OS X-native Scribus, all that is now necessary is to download the binary application (which can live anywhere), a handful of frameworks (that go into /Library/Frameworks) and Ghostscript (which also go to /Library/Frameworks). Clear and comprehensible instructions (as well as links to the downloadables) are available at http://aqua.scribus.net/\">http://aqua.scribus.net/.
Scribus on Windows seems somewhat less complex than this, as the only extra it seems to require is Ghostscript. The download and install (and installation caveats) for WinScribus can be found at http://windows.scribus.net. WinScribus is recommended for Win 2000 and XP only-Win 95 and 98 are not being actively supported at this time.
In beginning to use Scribus there will be a learning curve one must climb. After some experimentation we were able to arrange things in a way that fit the way we’ve learned to use QuarkXPress and InDesign. All controls are available from pulldowns and a great deal is available from a floating Properties palette, which seems to work like a combination of the Measurement/Control Palettes from the big boys with some important palettes added in. We found that keeping the Properties palette open while working most nearly approximated the user experience we had with InDesign (in particular, version 2) and QuarkXPress (version 4).
Support for Scribus is typical of the sort you’ll find with other well-known FOSS software such as OpenOffice.org, for example: the team handles bug reports on a cooperative basis, and Scribus supports fora and a wiki for documentation and advice. All can be found via the man site at http://www.scribus.net. Online help is available within the program but the end user might be left with more questions than answers; it has good introductory material but little specific end-user style help for use of specific functions: most of the help for such things appears to be a guide to API-style things and technical specs about the format that the end-users won’t find terribly useful.
This is, of course, a work in progress—a fairly high quality one, but still in progress.
The following is a series of issues brought up by our resident DTP doyenne, Elisabetta Bruno, as the questions she asks herself when evaluating DTP programs. I examined these concerns using AquaScribus running under Mac OS X 10.3.9.
On the next page we go over some of the features…
- About Scribus
- Installing, Running, and Getting Support
- Does it Make Pressworthy PDFs?
- Does It Handle Spot Colors?
- Does It Handle Clipping Paths and How?
- What about Preflighting?
- Does It Support Transparency?
- What Graphic Formats?
- Typography, Styles, and the Miscellaneous
- Is the Interface Intuitive?
- Should you use Scribus?
- Keep An Eye On Scribus
- Scribus Team Announces Version 1.3.3.2, Redesigns Website
- Scribus Team Announces 1.3.3.1 “Printemps”
- Scribus Team Announces Version 1.3.2
- Getting Started with Adobe InDesign CS 2
- Something We Should Learn from Quark’s Logo Controversy
- Acrobat 9 Pro: The Designorati Review
- Serif PagePlus 11 Released Today
- McDonald’s Coffee Beats Starbucks: Official
- Another Good Reason Not To Crack Graphics Software
- The squeeze is on
Does it import Quark XPress files or Adobe InDesign files?
Hello, David. Thanks for the comment.
Sadly, no. Scribus does not import .qxd or .indd files and it looks like support isn’t in the offing any time soon. The Scribus online documentation actually attemps to explain why.
If I may be allowed the indulgence of paraphrasing:
1. Format Complexity: DTP file formats are reputedly amongst the most complex file format of any type. The help quotes an unnamed designer as comparing the Pagemaker document spec to “a 2m x 3m flow chart diagram with 6 point type”, then points out that it wasn’t until InDesign 2.0 that PM file import could be considered reliable.
2. Formats are proprietary: the formats are sometimes patent-protected and documentation is confidential, and reverse-engineering is something that could get them in deep legal trouble that they do not have the resources to meet. Interestingly, the documentation mentioned that they at one time had a .qxd importer in testing, but Quark apparently told them to bear off.
3. Wise use of resources: they simply feel that (perhaps partially as a result of the above), given the available pool of talent and effort, that energy at this time is best put toward developing a better Scribus, and that working on import filters is something of a distraction. Judging by the amount of development they’ve done with it, I’d say it was a pretty good call.
At this point the documentation suggest using EPS, SVG, or PDF exchange to work with other designers on other platforms. Most likely that would look to mean rebuilding these files under those other platforms.
DESIGNORATI
Hi!
Thanks for this favourable review. I would agree with most of the UI issues you raised and I promise we will address those on the road to Scribus 1.4. Especially new features like clip paths often start at some obscure place and wander to a reasonable place later when we get feedback from our users.
Some notes:
Scribus also exports printshop ready PostScript, just print to a file.
The paragraph on graphics formats mixed up PDF and PSD: Scribus does *not* import PDF yet, it can only place PDF as raster graphic in an imageframe.
PSD import is quite advanced though.
Scribus imports PS, EPS, SVG and OO Draw as vector formats — with varying quality. Improvements for that and also PDF import as vectors is on the roadmap.
Oh, yes, and a new bugfix release is available: 1.3.3.2. :-)
/Andreas
Andreas:
Thanks for your comment. I must give you credit for your commenting attitude: I’ve seen varying experiences with open source application providers that run from very good to very bad, and yours rates pretty hight.
I say that because there are, as you might be aware of, various open source developers who deal less well with commentary. While my review of Scribus was, in the preponderance, positive, there were items which I was less than impressed with; you dealt with that criticism with class. Since my overview of Scribus was focused on the technical, I couldn’t put it in that one reason I think that Scribus may well make it over the long term is because of the positive, affirmative engagement that Scribus team has about complaints and gripes I’ve experienced to date. I can, however, say that here.
Also, thank you for rectifying my comment on the PDF/PSD point. I’ll correct that with an update to the article.
You’ll also notice that I’ve announced the release of your 1.3.3.2 number. I was planning to do that before I saw your comment.
Good luck on your continuing development of Scribus!
DESIGNORATI