LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Brian Marr <cabernet@ihug.com.au>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 10:37:48 +0930

Scribus and Desktop Publishing

Many would have noticed the recent release of Scribus 1.0. I downloaded and
installed Scribus-1.0.tar.gz on this Suse system. Freetype2 and Freetype2
devel are needed for the latest font display features. 
Beneath the surface Scribus is bloody good. It has come a long way in a 
short time. One of its features is producing .pdf documents that meet 
the latest adobe spec.

There are some instructions under help > Scribus tips, to get your own
settings to work when it starts up.
Initially it looks as if it has got a very basic colour set but the CMYK
feature is present when you look further. 
The bottom left hand corner has two icons for zooming in and out. In
addition the toolbar has a magnifying glass that will zoom to fill the
frame you create with your mouse.
All of the usual features like grid, snap to grid, colour fill, text boxes,
Layer support are present. It makes use of all of the fonts on this system. 
Under Preferences > General Scibus offers 18 GUI skins to use. You can take
your pick on how you want it to look.
Like a lot of software you need to spend time to get to know its feature
set.
More importantly stability has been good on this (compiled version)

It may not suit Microsoft users that are used to their own tool set, but for
Penguins and Open Source adherents it is a valuable addition to things like
Gimp, and Open Office draw, and indeed other (free) graphics programs emerging.

Someone I know is teaching Graphics/Image manipulation using Photoshop at Tafe. 
Honestly very few can afford the package, and others would have to rely upon
pirated copies. Everyone can own a copy of Scibus and Gimp. You can't beat
that.


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