Scribus is an open source and cross-platform software project that has been designed from the ground up to act as a feature-rich desktop publishing application for creating professional-grade pages with minimum effort and in a shortest time as possbible.
Features at a glance
Key features include support for ICC color management, color separation, ability to create CMYK separations and interactive PDFs with form fields, a user-friendly and modern graphical user interface, as well as scripting and presentation effects.
The beautiful GUI will allow the user to open an existing or recent document, create a new document from an existing template or create a new document and set its size, orientation, width, height, number of pages, default unit, printer margins, layout and automatic text frames from the get-go.
The application also comes with a wide range of templates and a plethora of professional features, such as support for inserting text, image or render frames, tables, shapes, polygons, lines or bezier curves, and numerous scripts.
Under the hood and supported OSes
The application is written entirely in the C++ programming language and its graphical user interface has been designed with the Qt GUI toolkit, which means that it will work well on a wide range of operating systems, including GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, GNU/Hurd, OS/2 Warp 4, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and eComStation.
Availability and supported architectures
While the program is distributed as DMG and EXE binary files for the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems, it is available for download only as a source archive on UNIX/Linux systems. However, the best way to install it on your Linux distribution is to use the packages from the official software repositories.
Bottom line
Summing up, Scribus is a unique application that brings professional-grade and hassle-free page layout to your GNU/Linux desktop. There’s no better app for desktop publishing tasks on the Linux platform.
