Customer Reviews

Scribus: Open-Source Desktop Publishing

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Finally there is a book on Scribus, and what a book! All the bits and pieces of help pages and wiki items have been assembled, rewritten as needed and put into a coherent and comprehensive guide. Much of the material is not available anywhere else. Covering version 1.3.3.12, a recent stable version, the book goes beyond just Scribus and discusses the various companion programs every Scribus user should have.

The author list reads like a Who's Who of the Scribus developers' world, including Gregory Pittman, Christoph Schafer, Craig Bradney, Peter Linnell and a dozen others. One of the virtues of Open Source software is the participation of the actual developers in the documentation process. The buyer is assured that the documentation is authoritative and complete.

This book was a long time coming, but was worth the wait.

I have done a lot of desktop publishing but have little experience with high-level page layout software. Using Scribus was confusing and frustrating until I bought this book. It is well done and very thorough. Creation of a simple book cover serves as an introductory tutorial. Hundreds of pages follow that add functions one at a time. It is all very practical -- push this, click that, select the other. Mixed in with the step-by-step material are comments on general philosophy that help wean the user from word processors into true page layout software. The book also treats Scribus on a variety of platforms -- Windows, UNIX, Linux, and Macintosh. The book's illustrations are a bit smudgy. The index is briefer than I would like. But all told, this is a great manual that I will make good use of for years.
John Reid, Bear DE

Scribus, besides providing solid general DTP info, furnishes links to virtually all open source document production packages available on Unix/Linux based to other, more esoteric, systems. With a single exception, MS licensed products (all legal) will soon be stripped from the eight machines operated by me. My partial business background include the printing and publishing world.

This is the manual for Scribus. It defines all the functions. It is not perfect, but had all the info I needed to make the transition from Pagemaker/InDesign/Quark for my quick printing business. Switching from commercial products to open source has saved me over $4000. per year in software costs. This includes the open source products Scribus, Gimp, and Inkscape.

This is the answer to (almost) all your q's.
It takes Scribus from one end of, and explain
how you use what and in what way. The only
flaw (as I see it) is that it's hard to use
it as desktop reference. But seen as a book
to learn the programs parts from, it's very
good and well written.