Application: Scribus

This application I just recently discovered. I had heard about it, but wasn't sure what it was. It's a desktop publishing program, that's quite full featured. I hadn't used something with this capability since my college days, when I worked on the student newspaper. It's great if you need to produce, newsletters, brochures, business cards, you name it.

Here's a screen shot:


There are a number of sample templates, that give you somewhat of an idea of the sort of things you can do with this software. In an upcoming post, I think I'll even do a tutorial for making a small newspaper. These examples are definitely not the limitations, from the initial perusal I would say this is more capable than most of the popular "publisher" programs available for windows. The only thing that's missing of course is a huge clipart library, but these things are freely available on the net. Check out the creative commons for more information on free graphics, audio, copy, etc.

Scribus uses a layout method for inputing the information, as opposed to being content centric. So it is definitely not a word processor. This is a desktop publishing application. The closest piece of software I've used that would give an idea of the functionality would be Adobe's Pagemaker.

Here's a more in depth screenshot showing one of the sample templates for a newsletter:


As you can see everything is layed out in boxes, as opposed to the flow type layout that you see in most word processors.

Over all this is a great application for getting yourself free of the bluescreen.

Next time I'll discuss one of the more obvious applications needed to break away from Microsoft software OpenOffice.

-NT