Scribus: Open source Desktop Publishing software

What is Desktop Publishing?

Desktop Publishing (DTP) software is used to create publications such as magazines, books, newspapers, leaflets, brochures and more, which are then printed on a home/office printer or mass produced at a printing press. The content for a publication is usually created in an external program, for example stories are written in Microsoft Word, photographs are edited in Adobe Photoshop and illustrations prepared in Adobe Illustrator. DTP software is then used to bring everything together by importing all the bits and pieces – the final output is exported in .PDF file format for easy access.

DTP software available comes divided for two target audiences. There is the professional kind, which usually comes with a hefty price tag – these include Quark XPress and Adobe inDesign, and there are others which cater for the home/small office user such as Grasshopper PageStream, Microsoft Publisher and Serif PagePlus. While scavenging Google for open source software I bumped into Scribus, which is probably the only open source/free desktop publishing software out there.  Weighing in at just over 20 megabytes in size, it is a very complete piece of software, and includes enough advanced features to be used for professional work. Installation was smooth and straightforward – on a side note, in order to use the EPS image format and print preview, a freely available, third party software called Ghostscript has to be installed.

Creating a new document presents the user with a number of options, including document layout (single page/double sided/3 fold or 4 fold), margin guides, bleeds, document size and orientation, number of pages and more. Alternatively one can opt to use one of the preset templates such as brochures or newsletters.

Importing

Importing text, pictures and illustrations in Scribus is straightforward. It supports a number of text formats, including text files (.txt), Html as well as OpenOffice (.sxw). Unfortunately Microsoft Word (.doc/.docx) is not supported, so Word files have to be saved in one of the supported formats. Alternatively, the user can do a copy/paste from Word into Scribus directly. This works fine, but formatting is automatically removed.

Scribus supports a wide range of popular vector file formats out there when it comes to importing, including Encapsulated Postscript (.eps) and Adobe Illustrator (.ai). Image formats supported include .pdf, .gif, .jpg, .png, .tif, .psd and many others.

Layout and design

Creating the layout in Scribus is done by using a number of tools situated in the toolbar on the top part of the display. These include insert text frame, insert image frame, insert table, shapes and polygons as well as a number of different type of line tools. Any object created can be manipulated at a later stage. Text Frames can have text flowing automatically from one another. This is useful when working with a multi-column layout. Just create two (or more) Text Frames, click on the first one and import the text into it. Subsequently, select the Link Text Frames icon, and then select the second Text Frame – text will automatically spill into it.

The layout and design aspect of this software is very extensive, it is up to the user to decide how ‘deep’, he or she will go into learning and using it. Whatever reason you have to use Scribus, whether to create a poster for your classroom, a leaflet to send home to parents, or the annual school publication, it will do the job. If you get stuck you can access the help files directly from the Help menu. Alternatively, you can access the documents page from here. If you would like to support the creators of Scribus you can do so buy purchasing an official printed copy of the manual which is available from Amazon.

Conrad Fenech
ICT Support Teacher