Open source yum cha

David M Williams
Wednesday, 05 September 2007 10:42

Business IT - Open Source

Scribus

Scribus is a desktop publishing program which couples a straightforward and user friendly interface with professional publishing facilities like CMYK colour, separations, ICC colour management and PDF creation. In this regard, whether you use it for making your Scout group sausage sizzle brochure, or producing a full-featured advertising catalogue, it will perform the task admirably.

It must be understood, Scribus is not a word processing system, but a page layout application. It will combine text and graphics giving you maximum control over the appearance of the resulting printed page. The Scribus web site lists their top twelve hints to help you obtain the best possible results, and a thriving user community are also keen to give loads of advice and help.

The Scribus team emphasise that anyone switching platforms would do well to consider Scribus over proprietary suites like Quark, PageMaker and InDesign, putting itself right into that category of product. However, unlike many other open source packages that seek to replace commercial software, Scribus does not provide any significant import or export facility. The authors explain this is due in part to the absolute complexity of desktop publishing file formats, but also due to the legally-enforced intellectual property constraints over them. At one time, a keen coder began work on a Scribus module to import Quark documents but this was soon cancelled after a written warning from Quark themselves.

This is not ultimately significant; Scribus can read and write EPS, SVG and PDF formats which are standards among desktop publishing and so files can be transferred between packages and collaborated on by exercising some diligence with “Save As”.

Scribus comes with a litany of user-supplied templates and language translations, and plug-in modules to provide additional utility. Very nicely, the Scribus project team strongly support those wishing to add their own code and provide clear documentation describing their coding standards. This information goes into extra detail on gotchas the team have picked up over time that cause frustrations to translators or which stymie porting the code to other platforms than that on which it was originally developed. A plugin “How-To” relates further exposition on fitting your code in with the general Scribus architecture.

That's today's open source banquet - and it was a true feast. Check these four apps out; they are all leading edge and absolutely top-class.