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1. Introduction

1.1 What is Scribus?

Scribus is a desktop page layout program in the tradition of Corel Ventura®,Quark Xpress®,Adobe Pagemaker®,or InDesign®

Since its launch in the spring of 2001, Scribus has rapidly matured and has gained quite a bit of polish, while remaining very usable. Already, it has the ability to layout newsletters, create corporate stationery, small posters and other documents which need flexible layout and/or the ability to output to professional quality image setting equipment. 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. Since the last stable 0.6 release, Scribus has added many new creative features, while increasing its stability and reliability, making it the premier choice for DTP on Linux or BSD with other platforms to come.

While the goals of the program are for ease of use and simple, easy to understand tools, 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, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of 4 color separations.

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)

Printing, PDF and SVG creation is via its 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 Postscript constructs and a limited subset of Level 3. This limitation is due to the difficulty of supporting some Level 3 constructs within older versions of Ghostscript. 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 GB and CMYK custom colors. The Scribus document file format is XML, an open source standard file format, a super set of HTML. 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 K Desktop Environment , Drag and Drop is enabled. Thus,for example you can drag and drop from the desktop to the pasteboard easily. There is a drag and drop scrapbook, which can contain frequently used items including text blocks, pictures and custom shaped frames. Scribus will also run under CDE, Gnome and Blackbox without diffifculties.

Beginning with 0.7.x, Scribus has been ported to Qt3, adding better print, user interface features and improved font handling. With the continuing refinements in the gcc compiler, Qt. Ghostscript and littlecms, Scribus will become more powerful, useful and user friendly for both casual and demanding users.

Originally written in German, Scribus has been translated into Bulgarian, Catalan, French, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

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 towards attempting to offer some useful documentation and structured testing - often a missing and much needed ingredient in many Open Source projects. A year plus later, I see great promise in Linux as an everyday desktop enviroment. The contining refinements in programs like Scribus has made this easier by the day.

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 importanly - 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 netscribe@attbi.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 (5.0.6 is recommended), as other PDF viewers like Xpdf and Ghostview do not have the javascript support for interactive forms.
More than anything, Scribus needs some expert debugging of some of the routines with the text boxes and/or someone who can contribute patches and ideas for more sophisticated handling of text. As Franz Schmid, the author has noted, "There are many things that would help, but in the moment it's difficult to get started with my code because the code has few if any comments (shame on me). Help is really welcome for the Text-Box. Tabs and good hyphenation is badly missing." (Ed. Note - Some of the code is in German, but it is not terribly difficult to understand or translate into English.)
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 will follow soon after the release of 0.8. 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@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@altmuehlnet.de

Contributions from:

Christian Töpp mr-ct@gmx.de Alastair Robinson blackfive@fakenhamweb.co.uk

Documentation:

German:Thomas Zastrow webmaster@thomas-zastrow.de French:Yves Ceccone yves@yeccoe.org English Maintainer:Peter Linnell netscribe@attbi.com

Translations:

German: Franz Schmid Franz.Schmid@altmuehlnet.de French: Michel Briand michelbriand@free.fr Yves Ceccone yves@yeccoe.org Spanish and Catalan: Josep Febrer jfebrer@linuxcorel.f2s.com Hungarian and Italian: Giovanni Biczó gbiczo@freestart.hu Ukrainian: Sergiy Kudryk kudryk@yahoo.com Bulgarian: Vasko Tomanov vasko@web.bg Galician: Manuel Anxo Rei manxopar@avogaciagalega.org Turkish: Erkan Kaplan Selamsana@uni.de Lithuanian: Aivaras Kirejevas kiras@mail.lt Slovak: Zdenko Podobný zdpo@mailbox.sk

September 2002


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