Mike Salsbury’s Blog

As part of the research I’ve been doing into whether a Mac OS X user
could find life on Linux acceptable, I took a look at the free
Scribus open source desktop publishing application.  In
the past, I’ve done graphic design and page layout as a part of my job,
and am intimately familiar with PageMaker 6.0 on the Macintosh platform
(pre OS X).  In appropriate places during this review, I’ll compare
Scribus to my memories of PageMaker.

What
is Scribus?

The Scribus web site describes the
software as “award-winning professional DTP” software which
provides “a combination of ‘press-ready’ output and new approaches
to page layout.”  They also boast that “Scribus has
rapidly developed into one of the premier desktop applications for
Linux.”  It supports a variety of features like separation
previews, scripting, CMYK color, ICC color management, PDF
import/export, Unicode text, vector (line) drawing tools, and
more. 

I
reviewed this software on a 933 MHz Apple Macintosh G4 with 1.5GB RAM
running Mac OS X 10.4 and the bundled version of Apple X11 for
Macintosh.  Scribus was installed on the review Macintosh using the
open source Fink and Fink Commander tools.  Installation was fairly
quick and easy using Fink, and the software launches within a couple of
seconds of clicking the Scribus icon in the “/sw/bin”
directory.

The file format used by Scribus is XML-based and
documented.  Since XML is text-based, even corrupted Scribus files
can be opened up using a text editor and perhaps partially or completely
rescued.  This is definitely an improvement over products like
PageMaker which use proprietary, undocumented formats that can become
corrupted and essentially useless.

Scribus accepts text input from CSV,
HTML, SXW, and TXT files.  It accepts images in GIF, JPG, PNG, XPM,
TIFF, EPS, and PDF formats.  Given that Scribus is first and
foremost a Linux tool, this combination of formats is probably more than
adequate for most Scribus users.  The Macintosh and PC designers
I’m familiar with would probably want to see more flexible text input,
such as allowing for the importing of text in RTF format, Microsoft Word
format, and perhaps others.  The only image formats I see missing
that a Macintosh or PC designer might use regularly are BMP (the Windows
bitmap format), PICT (Apple’s traditional bitmap format) PSD
(PhotoShop), Macromedia FreeHand, and Adobe Illustrator formats. 
You could get by without these by using The Gimp or another package to
transfer them to a supported format, though this would be an extra step
most artists I know would find bothersome.

It can export
pages as EPS graphics, PDF files, SVG files, PNG images, BMP images,
JPEG, PBM, PGM, PNG, PPM, XBM, or XPM.  This seems like a
“more than sufficient” list of formats.  EPS would work
well for importing into other software and getting quality
results.  The Scribus PDF output options are extremely robust and
complete, allowing for press-ready output (not examined in this review)
as well as on-screen viewing.  The other formats would permit
Scribus designs to be used on the web or in other tools.

I was quite
impressed with the ability to adjust the layout of text.  Scribus
allows you to lay out your text in typical geometric shapes (like
circles, ellipses, squares, rectangles, and the like) but also
customized shapes of your own design.  For example, you could start
with an oval and “put a dent in it” to flow around a nearby
graphic.  You could create your own path shaped like a car or
train.  In addition, you can bind text to a path.  You can
easily put background colors behind a block of text, change to
smallcaps, “mirror image” the text, etc.  When I last
regularly used Adobe PageMaker on the Macintosh (around 6.0), you
couldn’t do anything like this with it.  (Later versions of
PageMaker or the replacement product InDesign, I realize, might be
different.)  The only thing I didn’t like about the text layout
capabilities was the tendency for the software to break a line
“mid-word” causing something like “around” to become
“aro” on one line, “u” on the next, and
“nd” on the next.  This is a very minor nit,
however.  I’m not sure PageMaker wouldn’t have done the same thing
if it supported custom text shapes.  (See the graphic below.)

The text editor is pretty robust as well, offering
as much flexibility as many commercial word processors in terms of
editing and formatting text:

Like its Macintosh
and Windows counterparts, Scribus allows the designer to collect files
for output by a service bureau.  As mentioned elsewhere in this
article, you can also just output a complete PDF that provides a service
bureau with everything they should need to produce your document.

The printed output I obtained from Scribus through printing one
of its PDF files using the native Macintosh functionality was every bit
as good as any PageMaker output I ever created.  Exporting a layout
to one of the supported export formats also produced output that was
“more than acceptable”.

Scribus supports templates, paragraph styles, line styles,
shading, using tabs to align text, and more.  Text can be converted
to outlines to allow some graphic manipulation of it.  Scribus
supports layering of design objects (graphics, text) and moving objects
from layer to layer.  It includes a scrapbook for storing
frequently used graphics and text.  A font previewer is provided,
to allow you to see how a font will look when printed.

A
hyphenator is included, which can merely provide suggestions or actually
automatically hyphenate text as you type it.

Color Management is also supported.  Pictures and solid colors
within layouts can be profiled separately.  Monitor and printer
profiles are also supported. 

JavaScripts can be added to layouts.

Python
scripts can be used to extend the functionality of Scribus and to
automate common layout and design tasks.

Images can be manipulated within a layout using The Gimp if it’s
available (which it wasn’t on my test system).

An extensive array of
preferences allow you to manipulate the software’s GUI to replicate
Microsoft Windows, Motif, SGI, and others.  You can change mouse
behavior, switch measuring units from points to picas, millimeters, or
inches.  It supports document sizes from International standards
like A4 to Folio, Letter, legal, Tabloid, and others.  Custom
document sizes are also supported.  Autosaving can be enabled and
the interval set within a very wide range of time from as little as 1
minute to an hour or more.  You can change the on-screen rulers (or
guides) and display grids to help you more precisely layout your
design.  You can set the default font properties for text objects,
default image scaling, drawing object line weights/colors/fills,
magnification tool ranges, and more.

This, too, may have been a function of the test system (a
733MHz G4 Macintosh running OS X 10.4 with Apple’s X11) but there seemed
to be a very visible lag during the review period between selecting a
section of text using the mouse and having that text highlight inside
Scribus.  It didn’t make Scribus unusable, but I can imagine that
others would find it irritating.  It’s possible that such a lag
doesn’t exist on a Linux system (or other platform), so take this
criticism with a grain of salt unless you’re planning to use Scribus on
a comparable platform (Macintosh).

The help system in Scribus is more complete and extensive
than that of most open source applications I’ve used.  The text is
generally very easy to read and understand, allowing you to figure
things out pretty quickly.  On the other hand, some sections were a
bit disappointing.  For instance, the imporing section doesn’t
really provide help importing items into Scribus layouts (i.e., it
doesn’t walk you through the process or even explicitly list what kinds
of images you can import) but reads more like a rant from the author on
why it’s a bad idea to import JPG and other formats.  While this is
useful information, it’s not what I expect to find in
“documentation” when I’m trying to answer a question like
“How do I import a graphic into Scribus?” or “Why don’t I
seem to be able to import that BMP file?”  Since the product
is really quite easy to use if you’ve ever used a comparable layout
package on a Windows or Macintosh computer, this, too, is a minor nit to
pick with Scribus.

Other than what has already been
mentioned in this review, I could find nothing missing from Scribus that
I needed from a page layout program.  It worked fine in the testing
I did.  I saw no crashes, no unexpected error messages, and no
other  “undocumented behavior”.  It behaved like any
well-implemented professional application.  If, based on what
you’ve read here, Scribus sounds like it would meet your publishing
needs, I see no reason to hesitate recommending it to you.

Since I haven’t used Scribus for any extensive DTP work yet, I will
reserve the right to give it my usual “1 to 10 rating” until
I’ve worked with it more seriously.  Still, I can tell you at this
point that based on my own needs, it delivers all the major
functionality I would have expected from the (very expensive) Adobe
product, and more than I probably need.  I would therefore be
inclined to give it a higher rating, likely in the 8-10 range.

admin General Computer Topics design, desktop publishing, dtp, open source, page layout, Scribus