Scribus (Linux)

[Tami]

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 1.2, 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.

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, sophisticated "press-ready" PDF creation, EPS and PDF import/export and creation of color separations and optionally very complete ICC color management - thanks to littlecms, the first for an open source application.

Scribus supports many major graphic formats including most all of the standard ones used in DTP in addition to SVG import and export.

Printing is done via its own internal level 3 PS driver, including support for font embedding and sub-setting with True Type, Type 1 and Open Type fonts. The internal driver fully supports Level 2 Postscript constructs and very large set of Level 3.

PDF support includes transparency, encryption and a large set of the PDF 1.4 spec including interactive PDF's form fields, annotations and bookmarks. No other application is capable of producing such a wide range of PDF features on Linux, Unix like operating systems.

The file format is based on XML and fully documented. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents, may be partially recovered with a simple text editor - sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs.

When run with KDE 3.x, Drag and Drop is enabled, as well as inheriting KDE style plug-ins. Thus, for example you can drag and drop from the desktop to the pasteboard easily. There is a drag and drop scrapbook, which can contain frequently used items including text blocks, pictures and custom shapes.

Currently, the most recent version 1.2 of Scribus supports Open Type, True Type and Type1 Postscript fonts.