Scribus 1.3.9

Rated 50/50 by mcbeath123 at Feb 22, 2008

Having used Publisher for a while I wanted to move onto something that was more "Printer friendly" i.e. produce files that would reproduce faithfully when I sent them to a commercial printing house. This does the job and gives lots of flexibility to the final output. The design features are good and easy to use. It uses "styles" and other nice ways of working. Couple of things to think about. 1) Before you install, you must install ghostscript first. Check out their website. 2) This is not a Word-Processor *** DTP. It's a DTP. That means you do you story prep outside of Scribus including spell checking etc. Not a big deal, but you just have to think a bit more about it.

Rated 40/50 by tucifurlan at Oct 12, 2008

"Very usefull and comfortable" The library Dificul to move the text

Rated 10/50 by strongbad at Dec 12, 2008

It installed without crashing my machine. You'd better be a UNIX geek to understand how to use this because it won't work unless you also "invoke" something called ghostscript, which apparently can only be done using programming language on a command line. It is NOT Windows- friendly. Simply porting a UNIX program to Windows does not mean it's Windows- or user-friendly. This is another example that shows why UNIX and LINUX have not been widely adopted--It's arcane and fails to offer an intuitive alternative to UNIX. I hope I can uninstall it without crashing my machine.

Rated 30/50 by parisboysandgirlsclub at Dec 18, 2008

"misunderstood what it was. wanted something else." okay not what needed see on line summary see one line summary

Rated 20/50 by Mrate at May 6, 2009

"Good for mar, pa, girl guides news letter printing." Only good for mar, pa, girl guides type news letter printing. But I would rather stick with Word 6 for Windows'95(because it fast and powerful under XP). Very, Very slow too may error and crashes on big stuff needs allot of beta testing needed. Maybe designed for a computer with 4Gigs of memory. Best to use on XP with 1GIG memory, Vista will use a GIG of memory before you even get started, meaning more crashes or dropouts.

Rated 40/50 by ishan.sharma001 at May 19, 2009

"Feature Rich but Lacks Polish" Lot of features. Importing from Open Office and MS Office is excellent. Lot of control on documents. Strips out internal links from PDFs. Requires some time to get used to. You will need some time to be comfortable with it.Many features like PDF Bookmarks, Internal/External Links will need help from web but once you spend a day or two with it, its Awesome!

Rated 40/50 by Earwicker at Jun 8, 2009

It's getting there - especially now it can embed EPS/PDFs into the PDF output without rasterising. Still has some fairly basic bugs which is a pity, but it's improving. What's the problem with Vista fonts? The resulting PDFs aren't searchable and seem to render a bit slowly - otherwise this is starting to look horribly good!

Rated 50/50 by Earwicker at Jul 3, 2009

Yep, that's got it! Absolutely marvelous, I'll use this version in XP until the stable version for Linux is available. Thanks and congratulations to all the developers, this is out of the top drawer.

Rated 10/50 by akajfreak at Sep 11, 2009

"messed up GUI" no good comments sir The interface didn't load right. The whole thing looked broken. A toolbar was cut in half and one half was in the middle of the screen next to a scroll bar that did nothing. (no joke) I'm not sure why this GUI didn't work. My experience with this software smelled like pits.

Rated 20/50 by Phrixos at Sep 24, 2009

It must be said; It's free. Bug-ridden, crashes a lot. Many unnecessarily-long routines. Often obtuse--in even basic ways, like paragraph indentation and line spacing. Extremely limited font-color pallet (literally, DOZENS). Not for anything beyond a newsletter. Did I say "bug-ridden and crashes a lot?" Let me repeat that. Supposedly the stable version, I'd hate to have had experienced the unstable versions. (Maybe it's just Vista, but why only--only--with this program?) I should have suspected, immediately, that something was wrong, the moment I saw that the Windows re-size button didn't work. Then, again, when I tried to italicize a font. (Italicizing can be done, but you'd have more fun cutting off a finger. There are no Faux features for things like bold, italics, etc.) Even such a simple thing like capturing text in a text box is dodgy (Don't believe me? Watch some of the video tutorials our there. You have to struggle to drag over every letter of text. At times like driving a crooked nail, I commonly have had to "hit" some letters five or six times to capture them.) "Intuitive?" On Klingon, maybe. The folks at Scribus need to look up the definition of that word--and study it for about a year. The program is about as intuitive as "vittiniuine." Quark Express is both ridiculously expensive and difficult to master, so that too is out. Much as I hate having to go for Acrobat (it's no less obtuse in its own ways), there simply is no choice here. A two? A bit generous, I'd give it a one-and-a-half if I could. "Does nearly everything Acrobat does." I'm still laughing. Sorry, guys, for being reduced to such narkiness, but let's face it; you did drive me nuts. "Does nearly everything Acrobat does?" I'm still laughing.

Rated 30/50 by taylor_quicher at Feb 18, 2010

"Looks competent, but where's paging?" So far, looks okay Hard to learn looking at pages is not an easy task. Workspace non-existent.

Rated 50/50 by Iriseoir at Jun 16, 2010

Easy to use, great price and a great ad for open source software! Have't used it for long - so I have't come across any real cons. Perhaps the text justification could do with a tweak but it is early days! Having used Pagemaker and Quark in the dim and distant past, I was delighted to find such a good program to aid my migration to Open Source. The Scribus Book is essential. I am currently using it as my bedtime reading to make the most of Scribus.

Rated 50/50 by Aegis69 at Jun 29, 2010

Why anyone uses MS Publisher is a complete mystery when this is available, plus everyone can use the resulting files instead of just other people saddled with the misery that is publisher.

Rated 50/50 by giantkin at Oct 5, 2010

Does exactly what its supposed to do. None that i can think of.

Rated 10/50 by pjrpjrpjr at Oct 26, 2010

The download worked appropriately. But after that .... You must be a genius or very experienced in DTP to use. Not for a beginner or someone desiring to do something rather simple. The lack of online instructions is a debacle - piecemeal help at blogs, but that's it. Another freeware trainwreck.

Rated 40/50 by JohnInMA at Nov 18, 2010

Creates very high quality PDF docs. Versatile and multi-featured almost on par with costly professional products. Able to customize if skilled software type. The Scribus community is prototypical open source techie types. Not for those who aren't willing to spend time experimenting or learning. If you are looking for something that isn't costly but allows you many of the most essential functions of the commercial products, this one is hard to beat. A person must get used to the quirks, and spend time either creating your own notations - such as how to click through to intended outcome - or be willing to sift through what is already written. But the end results are almost as good as the professional brands.

Rated 10/50 by Rommac at Feb 14, 2011

None that I can think of. Will only download in Spanish. Would prefer the Language to be English. No help on this problem has been forthcoming

Rated 50/50 by SineWave at Mar 29, 2011

Combine it with Ghostscript, GSView, GIMP, InkScape and maybe Open Office if you need it and you've got a whole suite of office programs, but Open Sourced. I love this combo... :) Scribus has come far since v1.3.3 and I wholeheartedly recommend those who didn't like v1.3.3 to try this one. Love it! If you work with PDF documents you'll like it.

Rated 50/50 by breevesnm at Apr 11, 2011

Ease of use & layers. none that I can think of. I used Gimp to manipulate my photos and Scribus to make an e-book cover. Worked like a charm!