8 ms·

Libre Desktop Publishing

148 points by hucste 5y ago

dcminter 5y ago
Hmm. You know, it's been a few years since I last tried it, but when I did it was anything but user friendly, and I wasn't trying for anything complex. Has it improved recently or is it much of a muchness with its 2018(ish) incarnation?
- bovermyer 5y ago
  It has improved, but it's still nowhere near as good as InDesign or Affinity Publisher.
  - toastal 5y ago
    Neither of which work on Linux or BSD
    - brudgers 5y ago
      There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
    - briffid 5y ago
      it does using virtualbox and Windows
    - pseingatl 5y ago
      Affinity Publisher can't handle footnotes. An enormous omission.
    - bovermyer 5y ago
      In which case, your choice is either Scribus, or hand-writing LaTeX.
- rodgerd 5y ago
  > but when I did it was anything but user friendly I have always found it very easy to use, but I spend years at a job where I wrangled Quark and PageMaker as part of my job; it felt very familiar and comfortable.
  - freeopinion 5y ago
    With years of experience in Quark, PageMaker, and FrameMaker, Scribus was familiar, but not comfortable. I haven't looked at it in a few years, so I hope it is much better now. But the unusability for me was not because of unfamiliarity. I just wasn't satisfied with its capabilities. I always hoped it would keep getting better so it could have the abilities of those others. Perhaps it has.
unixhero 5y ago
I seems like such a tight application. But I never had a need for it. When do you use Scribus? In which workflows or for what kind of work or deliveries? "Publishing" tells me nothing, kind of.
- Tomte 5y ago
  Magazines, books, leaflets. Basically print, with a mixture of text and images.
  - pwthornton 5y ago
    We use InDesign for building reports and presentations at work. I imagine this could work for that as well. We use InDesign because it allows for much greater control over layout than something like PowerPoint. We want our reports and presentations (the big ones based on research) to be extremely polished.
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      I asked what the diagrams of a pretty complicated internal system in some documentation was done in once. Lots of them are just Draw.io, but these were hard coded images and there was an error that needed fixing. I thought maybe Visio or Illustrator (Inkscape is what I might use, TikZ would probably be asking a lot). Nope. Powerpoint. I guess I should feel lucky it wasn't Excel....
      - whartung 5y ago
        ...rummaging around my anecdote drawer... Back in the day I heard tell of someone who did their thesis on a Macintosh (this was back when they were still Macintoshes). Nothing to note on the surface, but the person used the program MacDraw to author it.
    - sigg3 5y ago
      I've used LaTeX and pdflatex with very good results, and I'm a total newb. But Scribus is very serious about PDFs: https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/ https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/ > Scribus was the first DTP program in the world that supported the demanding PDF/X-3 specification. No idea what that is but might be worth checking out.
thebeardisred 5y ago
In the past (2007-2010) I used it for magazine layout (https://dcplislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A38074#page/1/mode/1up https://dcplislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/dcplislandor...). Since I was in charge of ad layout, I would have a number of page templates and could fit things in based on common ad sizes. As other folks have pointed out it wasn't as "good" (said with wildly rolling eyes) as a paid commercial product but it did what I needed it to and I've verified that everything still opens up just fine almost 15 years later.
thunfisch 5y ago
I've used Scribus several times for album cover/booklet stuff. Worked really great, my biggest complaint is the inability to reduce transparencies. Almost all print shops expect you to deliver PDF 1.3, with reduced transparencies. That bit me hard on one of the projects, where I noticed this a bit late, and the last 24h before submission deadline were quite stressful :)
Gualdrapo 5y ago
I used it before knowing about ConTeXt for things at uni, and it was glitchy but actually great. At one assignment, the teacher told us to create a typography test layout and he provided us a gazillion of fonts in a CD. Its Python scripting feature saved my ass - while others spent like 1.5-2 weeks doing that, I just needed a couple of hours.
jl6 5y ago
I really wish there was libre software with the layout features of Scribus, but oriented to producing digital-native content formats (primarily PDF, maybe HTML). Scribus can output PDF but last time I looked into this, the PDF was viewed as something of a transport format on the way to the printer, with less interest in the PDF itself (no support for accessibility features, for example). The nearest equivalent I can see is LibreOffice.
- MikusR 5y ago
  > the PDF was viewed as something of a transport format on the way to the printer, with less interest in the PDF itself PDF is NOT a digital-native format.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    While that depends on how one defines "digital-native," I just don't think I agree. For a start, PDF was designed as a way to digitally send documents in print-ready form with embedded fonts and, in the case of PDF/X, other prepress-specific requirements. I get it may seem like I'm using "digitally" there as a mere technicality because the indented output is still physical print, but this is a computing-era solution to a computing-era problem. Less pedantically, though, I'm pretty sure that in 2022 a lot of PDFs are never printed, but are just viewed on-screen. They allow "print-like" typesetting and layout, but they're still being not just produced digitally but consumed digitally. Both my A/V receiver and my car have huge manuals that are delivered as PDFs, but I doubt either NAD and Honda are intending me to fire up the old laser printer to read 'em, right? (I don't think either one is even a standard printer page size.) Furthermore, the OP specifically mentioned accessibility! Accessible PDFs are absolutely a digital-native thing, since what makes PDFs accessible includes features like document structure tags, fully searchable text, interactive form fields, navigational aids, and alternative text image descriptions.
    - MrJohz 5y ago
      Definitely in the tabletop RPG community, PDFs are a digital product, in that a lot of people buy PDFs to use as a digital reference tool and never print them out. I mean, there's a minor cottage industry in auto-fillable PDF character sheets! In that situation, digital accessibility in PDFs is hugely important, even just little things like having your contents page actually link to the other pages in a document.
cozzyd 5y ago
I make my academic posters in scribus. Not sure what other tool would make sense (other than LaTeX, but while I use LaTeX for papers and presentations, I don't think designing a poster would be that ergonomic).
- petschge 5y ago
  Layout in LaTeX, tweak in inkscape...
  - _emacsomancer_ 5y ago
    What sort of tweaking of LaTeX do you end up doing in Inkscape?
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      I think they were probably responding to this part of the parent comment: > while I use LaTeX for papers and presentations, I don't think designing a poster would be that ergonomic I could see LaTeX but with tweaking in Inkscape being useful for posters and flyers.
- omnimus 5y ago
  I think you can use LaTeX inside Scribus text boxes.
  - cozzyd 5y ago
    Absolutely, how else would you write equations? :)
JasonFruit 5y ago
I compiled and typeset a hymnal of over 800 hymns using Lilypond, SQLite and Scribus, and the ability to automate the rough setup with Python scripts and then polish the layout by hand saved me probably a year's work. I would absolutely use Scribus if I ever again launched into such an impossibly huge project. It was a great experience, and the result was all I could have hoped.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Was the automation done using some kind of Scribus-supported layout format?
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    I'm honestly not quite sure what you're asking; there were a few (almost literally) stereotyped page layouts, which I was able to fill from a database, setting typefaces and sizes. That way, I got pages with the layout, tune image, and text, and I only had to adjust hyphenation to my liking and slug the text to fit the columns nicely.
    - themodelplumber 5y ago
      Database --> ? --> Layout with data in it Could you clarify those middle steps? Or even just name the technologies or formats used. Thank you.
      - JasonFruit 5y ago
        I see what you're asking. Scribus exposes an API (Scripter) that can do, though not everything Scribus' UI provides, a whole lot.
  - timClicks 5y ago
    Scribus uses XML as its native file format. So anything that can produce text can produce a file that can be understood by Scribus.
- 5y ago
Glyptodon 5y ago
Really useful for any low-budget printing application that's more than 1 page. Used for newsletters and some similar stuff in college like a decade ago. Totally reasonable for something like a high school newspaper if you don't have access to Adobe products and such.
teilo 5y ago
How is Scribus with footnotes, endnotes, and cross references (forward and back)? I need this for book work, and this is the one thing keeping me in InDesign. For everything else I have been using Afinity.
- omnimus 5y ago
  Not great. Indesign scripts and hacks are still only way to do more advanced stuff. I am in same boat with Affinity and i hope they add scripting one day.
franga2000 5y ago
Like most open source solutions, Scribus is so close to being usable, but ends up failing on the most basic of usability issues. Why can't I change the text properties of multiple text boxes at once? Why does text formatting reset when I delete all content in a box and start typing again? Why does the page stick the left side of the screen until I get to a certain zoom level when it starts being draggable again? Where are multi-color guides?
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  I think we can safely say that desktop open source applications are never going to have the polish of their commercial counterparts. None of the things you asked for are hard but the volunteer labor you are relying on is interested in other things. The only time open source really works is where it happens to intersect with some commercial interest.
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    Desktop open source applications is a broad category. I can list a few that are decidedly better than their commercial counterparts: VLC media player, qBittorrent, Firefox*, Calibre In fact, their commercial counterparts are and were so terrifically terrible, it put teenage me on a journey to discover better alternatives and how I discovered FLOSS in the first place. What you probably mean is 'Professional' desktop applications are provably never going to match commercial counterparts. In which case, at least for Software Dev work, it hasn't been true for decades. For creative work, commercial vendors have a tendency to squeeze out more from their customer base after a while, and that provides an opportunity to sneak in. FLOSS can also keep on trucking under the radar and suddenly appear to be good enough one day. Blender is an excellent example.
  - criddell 5y ago
    I think open source developers are also limited by their tools. They often want to make something cross platform so they end up using Qt or Gnome or Electron and these already put you behind. Thinking about it now, I guess it's another example of prioritizing differently, or as you said, interest in other things.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Desktop Publishing is a class of software that has lost a lot of its relevance as print became marginalized over the last thirty years. It's easy to forget that print used to be the #1 way to publish information. Most companies and people had no way to target radio/tv with their information and the internet was not really a thing yet. The only thing you could do was spread information in paper form and the attention for eyeballs was fiercely competitive. So, it was something that people payed a lot of attention to. Posters, pamflets, booklets, books, magazines, etc. Early web publishing was actually desktop publishing software adapted to the web. I remember dealing with web designs that were done in photoshop where our job was converting those layouts into frame and table based implementations. That's why CSS is such a convoluted mess. It tried to bridge the gap and confronted web designers targeting screens with units that make a lot more sense for print than they do for the a screen with dimensions measured in pixels. Until CSS, em, rem, etc. were not things that people designing graphical user interfaces concerned themselves with a lot. Unless they were creating desktop publishing software. Likewise notions of padding and margins are of course lifted straight from that world as well. The notions that they can go negative (!!) and can be set to "auto" were hacks to deal with the fact that screens don't have fixed dimensions that you can plan for, unlike paper. Likewise, absolute and relative positioning were hacks as a well. People still use that stuff but it leads to very brittle hard to maintain layouts. The subtle implementation differences between browsers make this even harder. Of course, despite being rooted in this stuff, CSS is not actually that commonly used for print. You can do print with CSS and people have done so but it's just not that widely used for print and probably a far too limited for professionals working in that space. I find it interesting that I had never even heard of Scribus. That's how niche this stuff has become. Unless you really need something like it, you'll never come across it. I don't think I've used anything like it in close to 20 years. I wrote my Ph D. thesis in Adobe Framemaker. That was a mistake as that particular version is now a combination of obsolete and obscure, which means I can no longer open the files I created. I'd probably need an emulator and the exact version of the software I used at the time. Luckily, I have a pdf and no actual need/desire to actually revise the text.
lizardactivist 5y ago
I see some outrageous complaints about Scribus here, but I'm going to say that it doesn't make sense to focus on small details and annoyances, throw your toys out the cot, and then proceed with saying that Scribus is practically unusable. It may not have the bells, whistles, and polish of a multi-million dollar commercial effort, but if you can't use a software like Scribus without getting angry and annoyed, then computers are probably not for you.
ldng 5y ago
I'm really wondering if being on Sourceforge is being a deterrent to developer attraction or not.
blacklion 5y ago
I don't understand, why all these applications don't adopt TeX layout algorithm, but better. TeX breaks paragraph to lines globally optimal, but breaks set of lines into pages locally optimal due to memory constrains of first implementation, as far as I understand. Why there is no Visual Page Layout tool, which allows to layout empty boxes to page template visually and then "pour" stream of text to these boxes which will be break to lines & pages (boxes) with TeX algorithm? It looks like perfect combination of visual layout (which is much easier than TeX/LaTeX tools if you need magazine-style irregular layout) and TeX perfect typography. I've tried Scribus when I was in charge of technical part of one samyzdat magazine, and it was good in layout and absolute nightmare in putting text in this layout. To be honest, it was something like 15 years ago. On the other hand, news on this site says about new text layout engine in branch 1.5 (year 2016!) and stable branch is still 1.4 (latest release in 2019). As far as I remember, I've tried version 1.3.x. Many-many years ago :-(
eloeffler 5y ago
If you want to try out Scribus, take the development branch (1.5.x)! I highly recommend going for the development branch that provides a lot of useful features still missing in the stable branch. And it's quite stable as well. Do frequently save your work, though. I've moved a student newspaper template from an old InDesign template to scribus several years ago and it worked very well. InDesign had many comfortable tools but it would regularly crash our old machines and the volunteers working for the paper could't use it on the go on their private computers. Scribus was easy to install, ran also on Linux, had a lower impact on the machine's performance (or it would crash before the machine, so save frequently :) )
_tom_ 5y ago
Article stops halfway through with an ellipsis on iPhone. Nothing seems to open the rest of the article. Not even requesting the desktop version fixes this.

148 points by hucste 5y ago

Hmm. You know, it's been a few years since I last tried it, but when I did it was anything but user friendly, and I wasn't trying for anything complex. Has it improved recently or is it much of a muchness with its 2018(ish) incarnation?

bovermyer 5y ago
It has improved, but it's still nowhere near as good as InDesign or Affinity Publisher.
- toastal 5y ago
  Neither of which work on Linux or BSD
  - brudgers 5y ago
    There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
  - briffid 5y ago
    it does using virtualbox and Windows
  - pseingatl 5y ago
    Affinity Publisher can't handle footnotes. An enormous omission.
  - bovermyer 5y ago
    In which case, your choice is either Scribus, or hand-writing LaTeX.
rodgerd 5y ago
> but when I did it was anything but user friendly I have always found it very easy to use, but I spend years at a job where I wrangled Quark and PageMaker as part of my job; it felt very familiar and comfortable.
- freeopinion 5y ago
  With years of experience in Quark, PageMaker, and FrameMaker, Scribus was familiar, but not comfortable. I haven't looked at it in a few years, so I hope it is much better now. But the unusability for me was not because of unfamiliarity. I just wasn't satisfied with its capabilities. I always hoped it would keep getting better so it could have the abilities of those others. Perhaps it has.

unixhero 5y ago

I seems like such a tight application. But I never had a need for it. When do you use Scribus? In which workflows or for what kind of work or deliveries? "Publishing" tells me nothing, kind of.

Tomte 5y ago
Magazines, books, leaflets. Basically print, with a mixture of text and images.
- pwthornton 5y ago
  We use InDesign for building reports and presentations at work. I imagine this could work for that as well. We use InDesign because it allows for much greater control over layout than something like PowerPoint. We want our reports and presentations (the big ones based on research) to be extremely polished.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    I asked what the diagrams of a pretty complicated internal system in some documentation was done in once. Lots of them are just Draw.io, but these were hard coded images and there was an error that needed fixing. I thought maybe Visio or Illustrator (Inkscape is what I might use, TikZ would probably be asking a lot). Nope. Powerpoint. I guess I should feel lucky it wasn't Excel....
    - whartung 5y ago
      ...rummaging around my anecdote drawer... Back in the day I heard tell of someone who did their thesis on a Macintosh (this was back when they were still Macintoshes). Nothing to note on the surface, but the person used the program MacDraw to author it.
  - sigg3 5y ago
    I've used LaTeX and pdflatex with very good results, and I'm a total newb. But Scribus is very serious about PDFs: https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/ https://www.scribus.net/category/why-scribus/ > Scribus was the first DTP program in the world that supported the demanding PDF/X-3 specification. No idea what that is but might be worth checking out.

thebeardisred 5y ago

In the past (2007-2010) I used it for magazine layout (https://dcplislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A38074#page/1/mode/1up https://dcplislandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/dcplislandor...). Since I was in charge of ad layout, I would have a number of page templates and could fit things in based on common ad sizes. As other folks have pointed out it wasn't as "good" (said with wildly rolling eyes) as a paid commercial product but it did what I needed it to and I've verified that everything still opens up just fine almost 15 years later.

thunfisch 5y ago

I've used Scribus several times for album cover/booklet stuff. Worked really great, my biggest complaint is the inability to reduce transparencies. Almost all print shops expect you to deliver PDF 1.3, with reduced transparencies. That bit me hard on one of the projects, where I noticed this a bit late, and the last 24h before submission deadline were quite stressful :)

Gualdrapo 5y ago

I used it before knowing about ConTeXt for things at uni, and it was glitchy but actually great. At one assignment, the teacher told us to create a typography test layout and he provided us a gazillion of fonts in a CD. Its Python scripting feature saved my ass - while others spent like 1.5-2 weeks doing that, I just needed a couple of hours.

jl6 5y ago

I really wish there was libre software with the layout features of Scribus, but oriented to producing digital-native content formats (primarily PDF, maybe HTML). Scribus can output PDF but last time I looked into this, the PDF was viewed as something of a transport format on the way to the printer, with less interest in the PDF itself (no support for accessibility features, for example). The nearest equivalent I can see is LibreOffice.

MikusR 5y ago
> the PDF was viewed as something of a transport format on the way to the printer, with less interest in the PDF itself PDF is NOT a digital-native format.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  While that depends on how one defines "digital-native," I just don't think I agree. For a start, PDF was designed as a way to digitally send documents in print-ready form with embedded fonts and, in the case of PDF/X, other prepress-specific requirements. I get it may seem like I'm using "digitally" there as a mere technicality because the indented output is still physical print, but this is a computing-era solution to a computing-era problem. Less pedantically, though, I'm pretty sure that in 2022 a lot of PDFs are never printed, but are just viewed on-screen. They allow "print-like" typesetting and layout, but they're still being not just produced digitally but consumed digitally. Both my A/V receiver and my car have huge manuals that are delivered as PDFs, but I doubt either NAD and Honda are intending me to fire up the old laser printer to read 'em, right? (I don't think either one is even a standard printer page size.) Furthermore, the OP specifically mentioned accessibility! Accessible PDFs are absolutely a digital-native thing, since what makes PDFs accessible includes features like document structure tags, fully searchable text, interactive form fields, navigational aids, and alternative text image descriptions.
  - MrJohz 5y ago
    Definitely in the tabletop RPG community, PDFs are a digital product, in that a lot of people buy PDFs to use as a digital reference tool and never print them out. I mean, there's a minor cottage industry in auto-fillable PDF character sheets! In that situation, digital accessibility in PDFs is hugely important, even just little things like having your contents page actually link to the other pages in a document.

cozzyd 5y ago

I make my academic posters in scribus. Not sure what other tool would make sense (other than LaTeX, but while I use LaTeX for papers and presentations, I don't think designing a poster would be that ergonomic).

petschge 5y ago
Layout in LaTeX, tweak in inkscape...
- _emacsomancer_ 5y ago
  What sort of tweaking of LaTeX do you end up doing in Inkscape?
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    I think they were probably responding to this part of the parent comment: > while I use LaTeX for papers and presentations, I don't think designing a poster would be that ergonomic I could see LaTeX but with tweaking in Inkscape being useful for posters and flyers.
omnimus 5y ago
I think you can use LaTeX inside Scribus text boxes.
- cozzyd 5y ago
  Absolutely, how else would you write equations? :)

JasonFruit 5y ago

I compiled and typeset a hymnal of over 800 hymns using Lilypond, SQLite and Scribus, and the ability to automate the rough setup with Python scripts and then polish the layout by hand saved me probably a year's work. I would absolutely use Scribus if I ever again launched into such an impossibly huge project. It was a great experience, and the result was all I could have hoped.

themodelplumber 5y ago
Was the automation done using some kind of Scribus-supported layout format?
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  I'm honestly not quite sure what you're asking; there were a few (almost literally) stereotyped page layouts, which I was able to fill from a database, setting typefaces and sizes. That way, I got pages with the layout, tune image, and text, and I only had to adjust hyphenation to my liking and slug the text to fit the columns nicely.
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    Database --> ? --> Layout with data in it Could you clarify those middle steps? Or even just name the technologies or formats used. Thank you.
    - JasonFruit 5y ago
      I see what you're asking. Scribus exposes an API (Scripter) that can do, though not everything Scribus' UI provides, a whole lot.
- timClicks 5y ago
  Scribus uses XML as its native file format. So anything that can produce text can produce a file that can be understood by Scribus.
5y ago

Glyptodon 5y ago

Really useful for any low-budget printing application that's more than 1 page. Used for newsletters and some similar stuff in college like a decade ago. Totally reasonable for something like a high school newspaper if you don't have access to Adobe products and such.

teilo 5y ago

How is Scribus with footnotes, endnotes, and cross references (forward and back)? I need this for book work, and this is the one thing keeping me in InDesign. For everything else I have been using Afinity.

omnimus 5y ago
Not great. Indesign scripts and hacks are still only way to do more advanced stuff. I am in same boat with Affinity and i hope they add scripting one day.

franga2000 5y ago

Like most open source solutions, Scribus is so close to being usable, but ends up failing on the most basic of usability issues. Why can't I change the text properties of multiple text boxes at once? Why does text formatting reset when I delete all content in a box and start typing again? Why does the page stick the left side of the screen until I get to a certain zoom level when it starts being draggable again? Where are multi-color guides?

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
I think we can safely say that desktop open source applications are never going to have the polish of their commercial counterparts. None of the things you asked for are hard but the volunteer labor you are relying on is interested in other things. The only time open source really works is where it happens to intersect with some commercial interest.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  Desktop open source applications is a broad category. I can list a few that are decidedly better than their commercial counterparts: VLC media player, qBittorrent, Firefox*, Calibre In fact, their commercial counterparts are and were so terrifically terrible, it put teenage me on a journey to discover better alternatives and how I discovered FLOSS in the first place. What you probably mean is 'Professional' desktop applications are provably never going to match commercial counterparts. In which case, at least for Software Dev work, it hasn't been true for decades. For creative work, commercial vendors have a tendency to squeeze out more from their customer base after a while, and that provides an opportunity to sneak in. FLOSS can also keep on trucking under the radar and suddenly appear to be good enough one day. Blender is an excellent example.
- criddell 5y ago
  I think open source developers are also limited by their tools. They often want to make something cross platform so they end up using Qt or Gnome or Electron and these already put you behind. Thinking about it now, I guess it's another example of prioritizing differently, or as you said, interest in other things.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Desktop Publishing is a class of software that has lost a lot of its relevance as print became marginalized over the last thirty years. It's easy to forget that print used to be the #1 way to publish information. Most companies and people had no way to target radio/tv with their information and the internet was not really a thing yet. The only thing you could do was spread information in paper form and the attention for eyeballs was fiercely competitive. So, it was something that people payed a lot of attention to. Posters, pamflets, booklets, books, magazines, etc. Early web publishing was actually desktop publishing software adapted to the web. I remember dealing with web designs that were done in photoshop where our job was converting those layouts into frame and table based implementations. That's why CSS is such a convoluted mess. It tried to bridge the gap and confronted web designers targeting screens with units that make a lot more sense for print than they do for the a screen with dimensions measured in pixels. Until CSS, em, rem, etc. were not things that people designing graphical user interfaces concerned themselves with a lot. Unless they were creating desktop publishing software. Likewise notions of padding and margins are of course lifted straight from that world as well. The notions that they can go negative (!!) and can be set to "auto" were hacks to deal with the fact that screens don't have fixed dimensions that you can plan for, unlike paper. Likewise, absolute and relative positioning were hacks as a well. People still use that stuff but it leads to very brittle hard to maintain layouts. The subtle implementation differences between browsers make this even harder. Of course, despite being rooted in this stuff, CSS is not actually that commonly used for print. You can do print with CSS and people have done so but it's just not that widely used for print and probably a far too limited for professionals working in that space. I find it interesting that I had never even heard of Scribus. That's how niche this stuff has become. Unless you really need something like it, you'll never come across it. I don't think I've used anything like it in close to 20 years. I wrote my Ph D. thesis in Adobe Framemaker. That was a mistake as that particular version is now a combination of obsolete and obscure, which means I can no longer open the files I created. I'd probably need an emulator and the exact version of the software I used at the time. Luckily, I have a pdf and no actual need/desire to actually revise the text.

lizardactivist 5y ago

I see some outrageous complaints about Scribus here, but I'm going to say that it doesn't make sense to focus on small details and annoyances, throw your toys out the cot, and then proceed with saying that Scribus is practically unusable. It may not have the bells, whistles, and polish of a multi-million dollar commercial effort, but if you can't use a software like Scribus without getting angry and annoyed, then computers are probably not for you.

ldng 5y ago

I'm really wondering if being on Sourceforge is being a deterrent to developer attraction or not.

blacklion 5y ago

I don't understand, why all these applications don't adopt TeX layout algorithm, but better. TeX breaks paragraph to lines globally optimal, but breaks set of lines into pages locally optimal due to memory constrains of first implementation, as far as I understand. Why there is no Visual Page Layout tool, which allows to layout empty boxes to page template visually and then "pour" stream of text to these boxes which will be break to lines & pages (boxes) with TeX algorithm? It looks like perfect combination of visual layout (which is much easier than TeX/LaTeX tools if you need magazine-style irregular layout) and TeX perfect typography. I've tried Scribus when I was in charge of technical part of one samyzdat magazine, and it was good in layout and absolute nightmare in putting text in this layout. To be honest, it was something like 15 years ago. On the other hand, news on this site says about new text layout engine in branch 1.5 (year 2016!) and stable branch is still 1.4 (latest release in 2019). As far as I remember, I've tried version 1.3.x. Many-many years ago :-(

eloeffler 5y ago

If you want to try out Scribus, take the development branch (1.5.x)! I highly recommend going for the development branch that provides a lot of useful features still missing in the stable branch. And it's quite stable as well. Do frequently save your work, though. I've moved a student newspaper template from an old InDesign template to scribus several years ago and it worked very well. InDesign had many comfortable tools but it would regularly crash our old machines and the volunteers working for the paper could't use it on the go on their private computers. Scribus was easy to install, ran also on Linux, had a lower impact on the machine's performance (or it would crash before the machine, so save frequently :) )

_tom_ 5y ago

Article stops halfway through with an ellipsis on iPhone. Nothing seems to open the rest of the article. Not even requesting the desktop version fixes this.