Scribus is an Open Source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4/e ComStation and Windows desktops with a combination of “press-ready” output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, Spot Colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Installation
Here we take a look at installing Scribus on our Ubuntu system.
First, bring up the Synaptic Package Manager by going to System \ Administration \ Synaptic Package Manager.
Search for the package called as scribus. Select the necessary packages that you want to install by Right-clicking them and hitting mark for installation. I selected the following packages.
scribus – Scribus 1. 3. 3. x (stable branch) scribus-ng – Scribus 1. 3. x (development branch) scribus-ng package can be installed paralelly to the scribus package scribus-template – developer and user-contributed additional templates scribus-doc – Scribus 1. 3. 3. x documentation icc-profiles – a collection of common ICC profiles to use with Scribus and other color profile-aware software lprof – hardware color profiler that can be used to create color profiles for your hardware to be used with Scribus qt3-qtconfig – Ubuntu users are strongly advised to install this package for finetuning the Scribus GUI with their Gnome desktop
Click the Apply Button to start installing the application.
Depending on the speed of your Internet connection the package will be downloaded and installed.
Using Scribus
You can start Scribus by going to Applications \ Graphics \ Scribus.
The following is how the application looks. The interface is pretty intuitive to use.
Let’s quickly create a quick letter head and save the file as PDF.
Open a new Scribus document.
Click on Insert \ Shape to insert a rectangle as shown below. By default the color of the rectangle shape is black.
In order to change the color of the shape, right click on it and click properties to bring up the properties window.
Click color to change the color of the box. Following is how it looks:
Now let’s get the image for our letter head. Make sure you have your image ready. Click on Insert \ Image Frame to insert an Image frame. (Note: This does not inserts image, it only inserts the frame). It should look something like this:
In order to insert the image in the image frame right click the image frame you just created and click Get Image.
Locate and select the image to insert it.
Now let’s create the title of the letter head. To do so click, Insert \ Text Frame. Right click on the frame and click Edit Text to bring up the text editing box. Enter the title of your letter head.
Let’s save this letter head in PDF format. Click File \ Export \ Save as PDF. The PDF file looks like this:
That’s it! The letter head is ready for use. If you are looking for a quality desktop publishing tool for Linux Scribus is definitely worth a look.
Scribus Homepage
