Document Index § Installation
1. Introduction
1.1 What is Scribus?
Scribus is a desktop page layout program in the tradition of Corel Ventura®, Quark Xpress®, Pagemaker® and InDesign®
Since its launch in the spring of 2001, Scribus 1.0 offers Linux and Unix users a versatile and user friendly page layout application. Scribus 1.0 and its recent development versions are being used in a number of ways; from brochure design to newletters and posters to technical documentation. Scribus has the type of the features one would expect in a spohisticated page layout application. You can do all the typical tasks like precision placing and rotating of text and/or images on a page, specify manual kerning of type and much more. With the release of Scribus 1.0, Linux and Unix users now have one more high quality application for the desktop, making it the premier choice for DTP on Linux or BSD with other platforms to come.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color and a simple color management system to soft proof images destined for high quality color printing, Other features include flexible PDF creation options, PDF Import, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of 4 color separations. Scribus also supports via freetype Unicode text including right to left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew.
Graphic formats which can be placed in Scribus include Encapsulated Post Script (eps), TIFF(Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), Portable Network Graphics (png) and XPixMap(xpm) Scribus now also handles any bit map file type supported by QT3.
Printing, PDF and SVG creation are via custom driver libraries and plug-ins, giving Scribus inventive features: the abilities to include presentation effects with PDF output, fully scriptable interactive PDF forms, SVG vector file output. The internal printer drivers fully support Level 2 and Level 3 postscript features including transparency and font embedding. The PDF driver from Scribus can embed fonts for postscript printing and you can use and output high resolution EPS files.
Other useful features include manual kerning of type, rotating object frames, bezier curves polygons, precision placement of objects, layering with RGB and CMYK custom colors. The Scribus document file format is XML, an open source standard file format, a super set of SGML. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents, can be recovered with a simple text editor - sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs.
When run from the KDE , Drag and Drop is enabled. Thus, for example you can drag and drop from the desktop to the canvas easily. There is easy to use drag and drop scrapbook, which can contain frequently used items including text blocks, pictures and custom shaped frames. Scribus will also run most any window manager including DE, Gnome and Blackbox without difficulties.
For a detailed listing of Scribus specifications see: Scribus Specifications
Originally written in German, Scribus has been translated into some 17 languages. Translation into other languages is greatly simplified with via Qt.
1.2 Author's Notes on the Documentation
My involvement with documenting Scribus began with simply trying to find a work-alike program for Pagemaker and Quark, while attempting to learn Red Hat 7.0 for server applications. Finding the Linux desktop more polished than expected, it made the jump to running Linux full time much easier. However, like many Windows refugees, looking to migrate to the Linux world, it was a struggle in the beginning to overcome some of the old habits from experience with DOS/Windows/Novell. However, I found the Open Source development model quite intriguing and Scribus, a project worthy of involvement. As a non-programmer, I decided to try to make a small contribution toward attempting to offer some useful documentation and structured testing - often a missing and much needed ingredient in many Open Source projects. Two years later, I see great promise in Linux as an everyday desktop environment. The containing refinements in programs like Scribus has made this easier by the day.
New users of Scribus are encouraged to look at Top Ten Hints and Notes on Optimizing Linux for DTP, as well as the PDF based documentation and tutorials. There is a lot of documentation for Scribus and more to come. This is very necessary with a complex subject like DTP.
Please accept in advance, my apologies to more experienced Linux/UNIX users who might find some of the documentation rather basic or obvious and its less than formal structure. I have tried to make the documentation useful for newer users who might have recently migrated to Linux from other platforms. Moreover, I have attempted to include know how from supporting users and companies who are actually involved in producing commercial publications and printing on other platforms.Hopefully, there are new insights for Linux/Unix users who have never had the powerful publishing tools in Scribus up until now.
I find Scribus, as a project, an excellent example of Open Source application development: A program author who has shown great skill at combining ease of use, rapidly coding enhancements and bug fixes. Most importantly, someone who has been patient and attentive in support of users of all kinds. There is a committed user base including experienced DTP specialists who are testing and extending the capabilities of Scribus. The results have been an application, very much needed for Linux and open source, usable today and showing great promise for the future. Most importantly - it has been fun!
One of the "pleasant" problems with Scribus as it has developed so rapidly, keeping up with the changes and enhancements can be a challenge. I have been maintaining the latest up to date version of the documentation, in between releases of Scribus, at: www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/ Please feel free to send questions, comments, flames, barbs or user suggestions about the documentation to scribusdocs at atlantictechsolutions.com
1.3 Contributing to Scribus - How you can help.
For all users, a very brief survey PDF survey.pdf is included in the docs folder. This is both a short demo of interactive PDF's which Scribus can create which is also a short user survey which will help to guide the future of Scribus. This survey will also give the developer a better sense of the user base. To edit the interactive form, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader (5.0.7 is recommended), as other PDF viewers like Xpdf and Ghostview do not have the javascript support for interactive forms.
Thanks to Paul Johnson, a great deal of the Scribus code and API's have been documented. There is both anoncvs and developer cvs. Patches are welcome and cvs write access can be granted to those who wish to contribute in meaningful ways. Other help which would be welcome is with import filters. Scribus has a plug-in API (the first color management tool is an example of the Scribus plug-in architecture.) A scripting API for Python and the plug-in API documentation is now available. If you know Qt or Python and can hack some of their libraries or know how to improve performance would also be very welcome.
Users are encouraged to submit bug reports, testing results and suggestions to the program author :Franz Schmid franz.schmid at altmuehlnet.de
1.4 Credits - Translations - Thanks
My personal thanks to Franz Schmid for all his patient answers to questions and to the others who have contributed to Scribus in many other ways.
Programming
Author and Maintainer: Franz Schmid Franz.Schmid at altmuehlnet.de
Contributions from:
Paul Johnson paulf.johnson at ukonline.co.uk Christian Töpp mr-ct at gmx.de Alastair Robinson blackfive at fakenhamweb.co.uk
Documentation:
German:Thomas Zastrow webmaster at thomas-zastrow.de French:Yves Ceccone yves at yeccoe.org English Maintainer:Peter Linnell scribusdocs at atlantictechsolutions.com
Translations:
German: Franz Schmid Franz.Schmid at altmuehlnet.de French: Michel Briand michelbriand at free.fr Yves Ceccone yves at yeccoe.org Nicolas Boos nicolas.boos at wanadoo.fr Spanish and Catalan: Josep Febrer jfebrer at linuxcorel.f2s.com Hungarian and Italian: Giovanni Biczó gbiczo at freestart.hu Ukrainian: Sergiy Kudryk kudryk at yahoo.com Bulgarian: Vasko Tomanov vasko at web.bg Galician: Manuel Anxo Rei manxopar at avogaciagalega.org Turkish: Erkan Kaplan Selamsana at uni.de Lithuanian: Aivaras Kirejevas kiras at mail.lt Slovak: Zdenko Podobný zdpo at mailbox.sk Polish Maciej Hañski m.hanski at gmx.at British English Paul F. Johnson paulf.johnson at ukonline.co.uk Danish Morten Langlo mlanglo at post6.tele.dk Czech Petr Vanek petr.vanek [at] ika [dot] cz Russian Alexandre Prokoudine avp at altlinux.ru Norwegian Johannes Wilm j at indymedia.no
12:07:2003
Document Index § Installation