scribus

I mentioned in an earllier post that I had recently been at a presentation on the Linux desktop publishing package named Scribus ( http://www.scribus.org.uk/ ). Last night I downloaded and installed it. It seems to be a very powerfull tool and helps round out the set of Linux desktop applications.

There was an in-depth article on Scribus in the Nov, 2003 issue of Linux Journal. It equated Scribus with Adobe Page Maker. The main point it made is that Desk Top publishing pacages are page layout applications rather than super typewriters. They use a different color management methodology and they treat text as an object. Scribus does all this and uses PDF and XML. It also can work with the GIMP.

I had a minor problem when I installed the user manual and the template set. Each of these is a separate package, and when I installed them they did not go into the scribus directory. To access them from the scribus menu bar I needed to move the manual and the templates into the main scribus directory - this took all of two minutes to figure out and do. I am sure this is because Scribus is originally a debian package and I am using Fedora Core 2. This demonstarates the need for the Linux Standard Base model.

I am interested in seeing just how easy it is to work with scribus as compared to blender (the hardest package I ahve ever seen) or the Gimp (the second hardest package I ahve ever worked with).