Linux Journal features a review of Scribus. Here are the author’s conclusions:
- Installation is a little tricky because it is not immediately clear how to get the latest version of Scribus
- Scribus handles most common file types correctly
- Tables are not handled elegantly
- Automatic text frames work best when the text to be inserted is more than a page or so long
- There does not seem to be any way to automatically apply formatting consistently to images and other graphics
- Scribus can be cautiously recommended as a capable page layout program
- It suffers, though, when compared to commercial page layout programs.
There are also interesting comments on the article. Here’s one of them:
We just finished our first Scribus based newsletter, this is from using PageMaker for the past 4 years and Ready Set Go before that. The transition wasn’t too bad, most of the work is settign up the new template and getting fonts Moved Over (Pagemaker was an OS9 version and Scribus is running in OSX). Without the nice plugins for gridspacing (now added to scribus) it took a little time on the spreadsheet to calculate my spacing. Setting up the paragraph styles was painless but necessary as applying formatting on the fly is a stumbling block for Scribus (and in some sense this is good, as it enforces consistency) File mangement is way different, as images cannot be embedded into the file like they could be with PageMaker, but once the concet was understood it was easy to transition. Spellchecking would be a nice feature which is in the works.
Our motivation for the transition? We could only afford the one License for PageMaker but could install scribus anywhere (and I can also edit on my Linux Laptop, which works fine BTW). From what I saw Scribus was kinda bad two years ago and now quite usable, who knows what improvements will be made by next year. If you want to compare look at our newsletters at http://www.hrcccr.org/pdfs.php - the January/February 2008 is from Scribus, older ones are from PageMaker- the massive size difference is due to images not scaled down before including (getting used to the new program). As far as color we print in B&W so that is also currently a non-issue for us. (Disclaimer - we don’t pretend to be professional DTP people.)
Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. It supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
