Scribus Reviews & Product Details

I enjoy using Scribus with both Illustrator and Photoshop. It's an excellent tool that you can use in combination with your creative cloud programs. Scribus is great for working with type. It really provides a more detailed way to design layouts and create type. It's a great product for any graphic designer Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scribus isnt super intuitive. It's a bit difficult to navigate in the beginning and i can see where people could get easily frustrated with learning where the tools are. If you're willing to put in the time and actually learn it's certainly worth it.. I honestly did a lot of googling when i first got it but once you get the hang of it, it's awesome! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best thing about Scribus I would say is it's complete support for CMYK color management capabilities. This is a feature that's sort of difficult to find in open source packages. It's also very easy to understand and use, with most of it's features being usable from the toolbar and all the object editing functions placed in context menus.

It's export function is also very good, with support for placing standard crop, alignment and color calibration marks.

Scribus is also extensible with custom Python plugins. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some basic functionality is provided by plugins included with the standard distribution of Scribus. Things like aligning an image to the center of an image frame for example. The problem is that as plugins these functions become sort of difficult to find for first time users.

There is only one function missing from the program that I think is very important: aligning two or more objects vertically or horizontally. This can be done manually by calculating and tweaking the positions of objects numerically, but it's certainly not the best way to do it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

First, Scribus is free and open source, which is very important in a field so specialized as desktop publishing. Commercial software like InDesign has prices so high that freelance designers, schools or nonprofit organizations can’t use them. Scribus is not a perfect substitute for those programs but it’s a great alternative to create all kind of publishing material with professional quality.

In Scribus there are some tools, like master pages or styles, which control most of the layout and design process. I like how easy is to integrate text and images and make them flow together. The placement of text boxes can be automated too, and it’s very easy to create pages, clone them and reuse them when you need. Mastering this basic concepts speeds up your workflow and makes you capable of carry out all kinds of projects, from simple ones, like two-page brochures, to fully illustrated manuals. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scribus is not easy, you need time to learn and master several concepts that can be tricky, especially for those who haven’t worked with software like InDesign or QuarkXpress before. More and more tutorials and guides are available each day, but the newcomer has to realize that an adaptation process is needed to become familiar with both the tools and the way everything is done in desktop publishing. However, as I said before, once the basics are mastered only your imagination is the limit.

A problem that Scribus team (as of version 1.4.6) has not yet solved is how to manage tables. The tool to create and modify them is so basic that it's not worth wasting time with it. It’s easier to create the tables we want in another program, for example LibreOffice or Inkscape, and then export them in a vector format that Scribus can read. I hope the next stable version of Scribus will have this problem solved, since creating and editing tables is basic in design.

Like in other open source programs there are also limitations with proprietary color palettes, for example Pantone. This but this must be taken into account if your work is going to a traditional printing office, if your output is PDF this is not an issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scribus is a great alternative to expensive seats of Indesign or Quark. I'm a professional marketing communications creative developer. I used QuarkXpress for more than 10 years, then started my own business and didn't feel like paying for Indesign or Quark, so I started doing some research. Came across Scribus, Inkscape and Paint.NET, and I've never looked back. I've been using it for 10 years, and it's never let me down. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Can't think of a darn thing. Seriously. Still thinking... (have I met 40 character minimum yet?) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scribus is available for Linux, including Ubuntu and other flavours that are user friendly, so it is available free of charge. Unlike many commercial software packages that beta test on paying users, Scribus encourages everyone to experiment with the software without charging you any money.

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Scribus will run on my Mac, but some things don't work as well. I would advise you try the program yourself because it works really well for layout and design of publications for web or print. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I loved that it was free and as capable as publisher Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The learning curve was pretty high for me Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.