Open source desktop publishing app

Scribus is a graphic and design program for your Windows desktop. It is a heavily packed software solution that contains some impressive features which will enable you to create and design your own magazines, newsletters, posters, and many other document types.

This is a notable and practical alternative to the expensive paid suite of Adobe InDesign. It provides the same exquisite color management options, making it an even more ideal tool for your print documents and interactive PDFs. It is an open-source project thus, you will be able to download and use it free of charge.

Is Scribus any good?

Although it’s completely free, Scribus offers some publishing power including support for CMYK color, separations, ICC color management, and versatile PDF creation. Although the interface isn’t as slick as it could be, it works excellently across platforms so it hasn’t been designed with any one particular operating system in mind.

One thing that isn’t so easy to master on this design tool though is formatting. You may encounter several formatting issues when importing text as everything has to be done manually. Even just changing fonts doesn’t happen in real-time. You have to change them and preview how they will look in another window. 

However, you can drag and drop elements with ease and export documents in EPS, SVG, and PDF format. Although importing PDF and EPS will be a hassle as you will need GhostScript to do so and this isn’t easy for beginners to scripting.

Is Scribus as good as InDesign?

Frankly, Scribus is far from being as feature-rich as Adobe InDesign but its offers are enough to suffice for your indie publishing venture or personal project needs in a more affordable way. Some functions that can only be experienced in other programs if you purchase them are available to use here free of charge. 

Thanks to its enthusiastic developer community, it’s able to consistently provide updates with new features and ensures its stability. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the capacity to open files from other desktop publishing software such as InDesign or QuarkXPress yet.     

A promising solution for basic publishing needs

Scribus has a lot of potential especially with the zealous developer community that it has. It is an adequate design solution for your basic publishing needs that enables you to produce professional-grade work at a cheaper price. Although it can be extremely complicated to use at times, it’s still a great alternative for other expensive publishing suites like VivaDesigner, Affinity Designer, Swift Publisher, etc.

According to the developers, Scribus is the only open source page layout application which runs natively on all 3 major desktop operating systems; Linux, MacOSX and Windows. Scribus also runs on Unix™ variants like Solaris. HP-UX and the BSDs.

Both online and direct commercial support is available for Scribus. There is a very friendly and active user community which has developed around Scribus with the active participation of the developers.