How to use Scribus for open source desktop publishing

While markup and document preparation systems, such as LaTeX and LyX, are good at creating long technical documents, they focus on document content and structure rather than providing fine-grained control of the layout that is typically required in some documents (such as flyers, ads, news reports, and periodicals).

Scribus is an open source, graphical desktop publishing tool that focuses on layout, framework, style, image management, and document flow between columns. Scribus is a free software run on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X platforms that provides most of the functionality of traditional DTP tools (such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe FrameMaker, and QuarkXPress) free of charge. Scribus generates PDFs and related formats of documents that can be printed simultaneously on standard laser printers, inkjet printers, and dedicated high-end laser image processing (RIP) publishing hardware and printing hardware.

Compare structured documents with layout-oriented documents

Structured documents assume that formatting commands, styles, and associated text have a single order. This order is generally referred to as a stream, because the individual document parts move linearly from one part to the next. To improve the paging and appearance of structured documents on specific printers or other output formats, portions of structured documents, such as pictures or sidebars, do not need to be accurately displayed in the appropriate location in the input document. These document parts can float in printed output, but need to be done in the context of a stream in a document.

A layout-oriented document is a document designed specifically for a particular output format, such as a 8.5x11-inch page, so this document supports constrained, unambiguous, accurate text and graphics positions based on the output format. To support this precise positioning, layout-oriented documents support multiple streams in a single document. These streams use frames to provide support, and the framework is a fixed-width area that contains text and graphics that can be connected (or chained) to other frames. The chain-Lock framework supports text that is too long to be placed in the first frame and that needs to be automatically extended to another frame. For example, a newspaper article that starts on a page but ends on another page usually contains a frame on the first page that connects to another frame on another page. This focus on multiple streams, the exact location of frames and graphics is the main difference between DTP and word processing software.

Common open source word processing packages (such as LaTeX and LyX) are designed to create structured documents, while other packages provide support for the framework, but do not require the use of these packages, including AbiWord, KWord (part of the KOffice, unfortunately It did not continue to be developed) and LibreOffice. Scribus is designed for DTP, so use the framework as a basic concept.

Installing the Scribus on a supported platform

Scribus is included in most Linux distributions in the repository. If your Linux distribution contains it, you can install Scribus on the system as root, or use the sudo command and the standard package management commands on your distribution.

If you are not using Linux, or if your Linux distribution's online repository does not contain Scribus packages, you can download Windows (32-bit or 64-bit), Mac OS X, Os/2 ecomstation, or H from the Scribus download page Aiku's latest version of Scribus. The download page also provides RPM CentOS for OpenSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Mandriva 6, and Packa Linux distributions Download link for GE Manager files.

Create or open a document in Scribus

After installing Scribus, select it from the Graphics menu on the GNOME Linux system, from the command line on any Linux system, from its folder in the Start menu on the Windows system, or from the Applicat on the Mac OS X system Ions folder to start it.

Unless you start Scribus by double-clicking an existing Scribus document in the graphics File Manager (or by providing the name of an existing Scribus file when you start Scribus from the command line), Scribus displays the New Document window when the program first starts Port, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The New Document window in the Scribus