Have you ever found it difficult to layout newsletters or brochures, even with the expensive desktop office software you bought? I know Word just cannot handle complex page layouts. Microsoft created MS Publisher just for this reason, and that makes it much easier to create publishing projects. But Publisher is expensive, so I’ve got you covered with the freeware fix. Scribus can handle all of those tasks with ease, and as open source software, it is continuously being updated and expanded. What is Scribus? Scribus is a highly versatile and useful tool for desktop publishing. Tracing its roots back to Linux, Scribus has been ported to OS2, Mac OS and Windows. Everyone can enjoy Scribus, no matter what their computing platform. So let’s take a look at this Linux killer app, on my Windows machine.

For anyone unfamiliar with desktop publishing, it is the process of creating all of those image rich documents, such as magazines, brochures, newsletters that depend on flash and creativity to look appealing to a mass audience. Magazines that were solely white pages and black text would be called books! So with Scribus lets’ add some pizzazz and interest to our documents. If you have not used desktop publishing applications before, no problem, neither had I. But when it comes to help, Scribus is well prepared. I’ll admit Scribus has a lot going on, not only in the interface, but as you dig through the dozens, if not hundreds of options and tweaks hidden in the menus. To make sense of it all, hit up the Scribus Wiki’s excellent tutorial. This walkthrough of the magazine creation process will help immensely for you to grow familiar with the tools Scribus has to offer. In only a few hours, you’ll be throwing out professional documents like you have been doing it for years. Granted though, subtle nuances of advanced techniques will take much more time to master.

I’ll make note here of a few things that you will find in the install readmes, but let’s be honest, not everyone takes time to read these thoroughly. Windows will need a third party download called Ghostscript. This small script ensures that Scribus can handle EPS files, and more importantly printing and PDFs. Yes, you can export your documents to PDF quite easily. Also note that Scribus is apparently picky with freeware fonts. I had no trouble with standard Windows fonts, but if you have a collection of fonts from the web, they may or may not work properly. Lets take a look at some of the tools you will find in Scribus, and there are plenty.

As I mentioned earlier, I followed the Scribus tutorial, and found it to be very helpful. Through reading it, I learned about most of the key features in Scribus. The very first step to creating a document is proper planning. Spend some time away from the computer to flesh out a page for your layout and then come back to fire up Scribus. The New Document window is an important place to start; it is where you configure page layouts and dimensions to work in. These should be chosen carefully; as they will affect all of the future steps you take in your work.

My creation was a sort of fictional magazine cover. I first placed my background image into its frame, which of course covered the entire page. You might wonder how you can be sure your frame is fitted properly, as well as how to edit the image or text within. This is where the Properties come in. According to the Scribus Wiki, this is the "heart and soul" of Scribus. And indeed every layer, object, piece of text, image, shape, line, what have you, can be tweaked individually via the Properties box. Using the various tabs (see screenshot below); XYZ, Shape, Text, Image, Line and Colors, within the box, you can move the object to any exact position, down to the thousandth millimeter. Using the Colors options, I could apply hundreds of shades and opacity levels to my objects in a flash, which update in real time, so I could see my changes on the fly, without opening and closing the properties box. Also handy, locking objects in place when you’ve finished with them, even temporarily, avoiding accidental changes as you work elsewhere in the document.

While Scribus is no replacement for a dedicated word processor, it does have some basic tools for manipulating the text in your document. The "Story Editor" can handle all text editing functions you’ll find in Microsoft WordPad, such as fonts, alignments, bold/italic etc. You can also insert sample text to fill a text box if you need to check its appearance. What does "Lorem Ipsum" mean anyway?

To conclude, Scribus is very well made and feature rich desktop publishing software. If you have any need for this kind of program but do not want to shell out for any expensive brand name program, give Scribus a try at www.scribus.net

Oh, and apparently ‘lorem ipsum‘ came from the works of Cicero. I’m sure you were curious.