Summary
Scribus is a GPL desktop publishing (DTP) program similar to QuarkXPressTM, Adobe PageMakerTM or Adobe InDesignTM. It is designed to be both user friendly and powerful for advanced users.
Document Editing Features:
- Frames, visible and hidden with support for rounded edges and corners for text and objects, rotatable and scaleable
- Page Templates - Page Palettes allow for easy page management
- Document-wide layers - editable and items can be moved
- Paragraph styles with numerous paragraph and text style options (alignment, fonts)
- Manual kerning of type and embedding fonts allowed in all documents including PDF's.
- Object linking, grouping, moving,locking, resizing and converting
- Margins, guides and snap to grid which can be user defined, as well as hidden or visible
Professional Publishing Features
- CMYK color including ICC color managed previews of images and embedding ICC profiles in PDF documents for accurate screen to print colors.
- Creation of CMYK color Postscript separations
- Sophisticated PDF creation, including interactive PDF forms, support for nearly all PDF field types, and JavaScript actions
- The ability to output to professional quality imagesetting equipment including advanced Level 3 postscript devices
- Encapsulated PostScript® import with previews on the page canvas / EPS export
- Full support for Level 2 PostScript output and a subset of Level 3 (recently augmented with new support for Level 3 PS layering and transparency)
- Coming soon: Full Compliancy with for PDF/X-3, an ISO standard for exchanging press ready PDF's - a first for a Linux/*nix application.
Ease of use features:
- Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc.
- Online help browser with extensive documentation in English with sample files included
- Easy to use tools and palettes for measurement, rotation and other object properties
- Full support for both True Type and Type1 Postscript fonts
- User configurable keyboard shortcuts
- Ability to run in different languages without recompilation
- Sophisticated automatic hyphenation engine with several languages available
- Easy to use drawing tools for custom shapes including: lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
- Detailed and flexible user preferences for document and application defaults
File Formats:
- EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) PNG (Portable Network Graphics), TIFF (Tag Image File Format), and XPM (XpixMap)
- Scribus native file format is fully documented and XML based - a PDF of the file format will be on line soon.
- Scribus can also export SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) including text on a path
Architecture:
- Developed with GPL QT 3 for Linux and "Linux like" operating systems
- Plug-in support and API including a color management plug-in and special character inserter
- Powerful Python Scripting Plug-in for extending Scribus functions and automating tasks
Target Usage:
- Layouts for newsletters, corporate stationery, posters, training manuals, technical documentation, business cards and other documents which need flexible layout and/or sophisticated image handling, as well as precise typography controls and image sizing not available in current word processors and
- Users needing the ability to output to professional quality image setting equipment, as well as repurposing for internal printing, web distributed PDF's or presentations