As other folks have pointed out it wasn't as "good" (said with wildly rolling eyes) as a paid commercial product but it did what I needed it to and I've verified that everything still opens up just fine almost 15 years later.
I compiled and typeset a hymnal of over 800 hymns using Lilypond, SQLite and Scribus, and the ability to automate the rough setup with Python scripts and then polish the layout by hand saved me probably a year's work. I would absolutely use Scribus if I ever again launched into such an impossibly huge project. It was a great experience, and the result was all I could have hoped.
Ha, I did a (much smaller) project combining Lilypond and Scribus as well. My patch for this (https://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=14723) is still stuck in limbo, doesn't look like they are going to apply it any time soon.
In what format did you embed the Lilypond output? I tried it first as EPS, but the print result was really disappointing because Scribus (at the time at least) rasterised EPS instead of actually embedding the vector graphics.
I'm honestly not quite sure what you're asking; there were a few (almost literally) stereotyped page layouts, which I was able to fill from a database, setting typefaces and sizes. That way, I got pages with the layout, tune image, and text, and I only had to adjust hyphenation to my liking and slug the text to fit the columns nicely.
Very interesting. I had thought of going that route when thinking of compiling a songbook, but wondered if simply going with LaTeX, would be better. Anyway, my project never materialized.
From what I've read, the python scripting is very empowering... I'm curious to learn more details about how you got this project done. You can private message me if you prefer.
Like most open source solutions, Scribus is so close to being usable, but ends up failing on the most basic of usability issues. Why can't I change the text properties of multiple text boxes at once? Why does text formatting reset when I delete all content in a box and start typing again? Why does the page stick the left side of the screen until I get to a certain zoom level when it starts being draggable again? Where are multi-color guides?
My wife uses it, hates it, finds workarounds for its weird issues. After several years using it she still doesn't like it.
Her biggest complaints: bold/italic, and hitting return in a text box switches back to the default font.
To be fair to her, she's not what you'd call "into tech". Not clueless by long chalk, but not into exploring every inch of a product. I've offered to sit with her and go through some of the issues, but she just stick to her current workflow and bitch about it occasionally. Part of me knows what she feels like. A lot of people never learn vim, bitch about it when they find themselves on a remote server having to edit a long config file in vim, but still never learn vim.
In the case of Scribus, her biggest gripe isn't a bug it's a "WON'T FIX STOP ASKING"
I think we can safely say that desktop open source applications are never going to have the polish of their commercial counterparts. None of the things you asked for are hard but the volunteer labor you are relying on is interested in other things.
The only time open source really works is where it happens to intersect with some commercial interest.
Desktop open source applications is a broad category. I can list a few that are decidedly better than their commercial counterparts: VLC media player, qBittorrent, Firefox*, Calibre
In fact, their commercial counterparts are and were so terrifically terrible, it put teenage me on a journey to discover better alternatives and how I discovered FLOSS in the first place.
What you probably mean is 'Professional' desktop applications are provably never going to match commercial counterparts. In which case, at least for Software Dev work, it hasn't been true for decades.
For creative work, commercial vendors have a tendency to squeeze out more from their customer base after a while, and that provides an opportunity to sneak in. FLOSS can also keep on trucking under the radar and suddenly appear to be good enough one day. Blender is an excellent example.
I think open source developers are also limited by their tools. They often want to make something cross platform so they end up using Qt or Gnome or Electron and these already put you behind. Thinking about it now, I guess it's another example of prioritizing differently, or as you said, interest in other things.
I've used Scribus several times for album cover/booklet stuff. Worked really great, my biggest complaint is the inability to reduce transparencies. Almost all print shops expect you to deliver PDF 1.3, with reduced transparencies. That bit me hard on one of the projects, where I noticed this a bit late, and the last 24h before submission deadline were quite stressful :)
If you want to try out Scribus, take the development branch (1.5.x)!
I highly recommend going for the development branch that provides a lot of useful features still missing in the stable branch. And it's quite stable as well. Do frequently save your work, though.
I've moved a student newspaper template from an old InDesign template to scribus several years ago and it worked very well. InDesign had many comfortable tools but it would regularly crash our old machines and the volunteers working for the paper could't use it on the go on their private computers.
Scribus was easy to install, ran also on Linux, had a lower impact on the machine's performance (or it would crash before the machine, so save frequently :) )
I used it before knowing about ConTeXt for things at uni, and it was glitchy but actually great. At one assignment, the teacher told us to create a typography test layout and he provided us a gazillion of fonts in a CD. Its Python scripting feature saved my ass - while others spent like 1.5-2 weeks doing that, I just needed a couple of hours.
I really wish there was libre software with the layout features of Scribus, but oriented to producing digital-native content formats (primarily PDF, maybe HTML). Scribus can output PDF but last time I looked into this, the PDF was viewed as something of a transport format on the way to the printer, with less interest in the PDF itself (no support for accessibility features, for example).
While that depends on how one defines "digital-native," I just don't think I agree.
For a start, PDF was designed as a way to digitally send documents in print-ready form with embedded fonts and, in the case of PDF/X, other prepress-specific requirements. I get it may seem like I'm using "digitally" there as a mere technicality because the indented output is still physical print, but this is a computing-era solution to a computing-era problem.
Less pedantically, though, I'm pretty sure that in 2022 a lot of PDFs are never printed, but are just viewed on-screen. They allow "print-like" typesetting and layout, but they're still being not just produced digitally but consumed digitally. Both my A/V receiver and my car have huge manuals that are delivered as PDFs, but I doubt either NAD and Honda are intending me to fire up the old laser printer to read 'em, right? (I don't think either one is even a standard printer page size.)
Furthermore, the OP specifically mentioned accessibility! Accessible PDFs are absolutely a digital-native thing, since what makes PDFs accessible includes features like document structure tags, fully searchable text, interactive form fields, navigational aids, and alternative text image descriptions.
Definitely in the tabletop RPG community, PDFs are a digital product, in that a lot of people buy PDFs to use as a digital reference tool and never print them out. I mean, there's a minor cottage industry in auto-fillable PDF character sheets!
In that situation, digital accessibility in PDFs is hugely important, even just little things like having your contents page actually link to the other pages in a document.
Oh yes, I was absolutely blown away when my gf showed me a PDF character sheet that she bought, which worked better than any of the proper apps (including the official website) made for this purpose. For all intents and purposes, it was an app - there was hierarchical content you could search through, setup wizards, automatic calculation... all implemented in PDF forms and whatever cursed scripting language Adobe inclues in Acrobat these days.
I make my academic posters in scribus. Not sure what other tool would make sense (other than LaTeX, but while I use LaTeX for papers and presentations, I don't think designing a poster would be that ergonomic).
I see some outrageous complaints about Scribus here, but I'm going to say that it doesn't make sense to focus on small details and annoyances, throw your toys out the cot, and then proceed with saying that Scribus is practically unusable.
It may not have the bells, whistles, and polish of a multi-million dollar commercial effort, but if you can't use a software like Scribus without getting angry and annoyed, then computers are probably not for you.
I seems like such a tight application. But I never had a need for it. When do you use Scribus? In which workflows or for what kind of work or deliveries? "Publishing" tells me nothing, kind of.
This is a bit like when young people express wide-eyed astonishment that bookmarks were physical objects.
"Publishing" tells you what you need to know if you know that the word as used in the internet era is a slight repurposing of a word which has a distinct pre-internet meaning.
More specifically, "Desktop Publishing" is a late 1970s, early 1980s term for packages that made it possible to do any kind of controlled-layout publishing from a computer at all.
Do you mean you could like, doodle around on a computer and get the output on the page the same as on the screen ancient one? Instead of using scissors and glue and paper cut outs? :)
Man, I kinda want to setup one of those giant touch screen tables and some sort of AR hybrid. Pretend I'm doing it the old way but with none of the downsides.
Sweeping scissors pantomime and minority report motions. Blank pieces of paper with different content projected unto them by... lasers, dependent on where on the table they happen to land.
Glue sticks that are actually remote control knobs.
Back in the eighties I remember visiting a lot of clients that had an Apple Mac, Apple LaserWriter and Aldus Pagemaker on their desk. I suspect Apple would have failed if it wasn't for their success in this niche.
Publishing in particular, instead of the more general print, means creating for mass publication workflows usually involving a press. This usually involves pre-print, different outputs options (including spot colors, separate plates for four-color CMYK printing, registration, and color profiles to match or limit display colors to inks), and printing with bleed for trimming. Many of these tools also provide advanced options for typesetting, like wrapping text around images or shapes with specific hyphenation rules, or aligning text on a baseline grid for consistency across pages.
Other tools that can print don't often offer all of these features, or if they do they don't provide as much control over them.
In the past I found it useful to design and layout a pen-and-paper role playing game book and export it as a print-ready PDF i could send to the printer(s).
Specifically, it has CMYK support, allowed me to layout images and text side-by-side and/or overlapping, along with shaded backgrounds for readability and emphasis.
Most books didn't require something this heavy, but the images were a pain without it.
I can't speak to Sribus. But also, another aspect of publishing was complete and total control over page layout. Not document layout, page layout.
Notably this including things like adjusting the spacing on a particular line in order to prevent a line break, hyphenation, word wrap, or even creeping on to another page. It's not just about setting fonts and margins, but goes deeper than that.
We use InDesign for building reports and presentations at work. I imagine this could work for that as well.
We use InDesign because it allows for much greater control over layout than something like PowerPoint. We want our reports and presentations (the big ones based on research) to be extremely polished.
This is its killer feature! I've had compliments from multiple pro printers regarding my print PDFs produced with Scribus. Even though most usual PDF pipelines are Adobe based, Scribus PDF files are superior.
This is not true. Dont forget PDF is format developed by Adobe. There is no reason Scribus output would be superior.
Its probably simply that you are more mindful, experienced, systematic user where adobe gets used by complete amateurs more often who have no idea about output.
I asked what the diagrams of a pretty complicated internal system in some documentation was done in once. Lots of them are just Draw.io, but these were hard coded images and there was an error that needed fixing. I thought maybe Visio or Illustrator (Inkscape is what I might use, TikZ would probably be asking a lot). Nope. Powerpoint. I guess I should feel lucky it wasn't Excel....
I use it for everything where I need to arrange images and graphical elements or put text on something (images, documents,..) in a controlled and possibly aesthetically pleasing manner.
I don't understand, why all these applications don't adopt TeX layout algorithm, but better. TeX breaks paragraph to lines globally optimal, but breaks set of lines into pages locally optimal due to memory constrains of first implementation, as far as I understand.
Why there is no Visual Page Layout tool, which allows to layout empty boxes to page template visually and then "pour" stream of text to these boxes which will be break to lines & pages (boxes) with TeX algorithm? It looks like perfect combination of visual layout (which is much easier than TeX/LaTeX tools if you need magazine-style irregular layout) and TeX perfect typography.
I've tried Scribus when I was in charge of technical part of one samyzdat magazine, and it was good in layout and absolute nightmare in putting text in this layout. To be honest, it was something like 15 years ago. On the other hand, news on this site says about new text layout engine in branch 1.5 (year 2016!) and stable branch is still 1.4 (latest release in 2019). As far as I remember, I've tried version 1.3.x. Many-many years ago :-(
Really useful for any low-budget printing application that's more than 1 page. Used for newsletters and some similar stuff in college like a decade ago. Totally reasonable for something like a high school newspaper if you don't have access to Adobe products and such.
Desktop Publishing is a class of software that has lost a lot of its relevance as print became marginalized over the last thirty years. It's easy to forget that print used to be the #1 way to publish information. Most companies and people had no way to target radio/tv with their information and the internet was not really a thing yet. The only thing you could do was spread information in paper form and the attention for eyeballs was fiercely competitive. So, it was something that people payed a lot of attention to.
Posters, pamflets, booklets, books, magazines, etc. Early web publishing was actually desktop publishing software adapted to the web. I remember dealing with web designs that were done in photoshop where our job was converting those layouts into frame and table based implementations. That's why CSS is such a convoluted mess. It tried to bridge the gap and confronted web designers targeting screens with units that make a lot more sense for print than they do for the a screen with dimensions measured in pixels.
Until CSS, em, rem, etc. were not things that people designing graphical user interfaces concerned themselves with a lot. Unless they were creating desktop publishing software. Likewise notions of padding and margins are of course lifted straight from that world as well. The notions that they can go negative (!!) and can be set to "auto" were hacks to deal with the fact that screens don't have fixed dimensions that you can plan for, unlike paper. Likewise, absolute and relative positioning were hacks as a well. People still use that stuff but it leads to very brittle hard to maintain layouts. The subtle implementation differences between browsers make this even harder.
Of course, despite being rooted in this stuff, CSS is not actually that commonly used for print. You can do print with CSS and people have done so but it's just not that widely used for print and probably a far too limited for professionals working in that space.
I find it interesting that I had never even heard of Scribus. That's how niche this stuff has become. Unless you really need something like it, you'll never come across it. I don't think I've used anything like it in close to 20 years. I wrote my Ph D. thesis in Adobe Framemaker. That was a mistake as that particular version is now a combination of obsolete and obscure, which means I can no longer open the files I created. I'd probably need an emulator and the exact version of the software I used at the time. Luckily, I have a pdf and no actual need/desire to actually revise the text.
Hmm. You know, it's been a few years since I last tried it, but when I did it was anything but user friendly, and I wasn't trying for anything complex.
Has it improved recently or is it much of a muchness with its 2018(ish) incarnation?
> but when I did it was anything but user friendly
I have always found it very easy to use, but I spend years at a job where I wrangled Quark and PageMaker as part of my job; it felt very familiar and comfortable.
With years of experience in Quark, PageMaker, and FrameMaker, Scribus was familiar, but not comfortable. I haven't looked at it in a few years, so I hope it is much better now. But the unusability for me was not because of unfamiliarity. I just wasn't satisfied with its capabilities. I always hoped it would keep getting better so it could have the abilities of those others. Perhaps it has.
How is Scribus with footnotes, endnotes, and cross references (forward and back)? I need this for book work, and this is the one thing keeping me in InDesign. For everything else I have been using Afinity.
Not great. Indesign scripts and hacks are still only way to do more advanced stuff. I am in same boat with Affinity and i hope they add scripting one day.
Article stops halfway through with an ellipsis on iPhone. Nothing seems to open the rest of the article. Not even requesting the desktop version fixes this.
As other folks have pointed out it wasn't as "good" (said with wildly rolling eyes) as a paid commercial product but it did what I needed it to and I've verified that everything still opens up just fine almost 15 years later.