Navigating and Working in Scribus

Bruce Byfield — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:48:53 +0000

Scribus has mixed reputation among free software users. On the one hand, users are vaguely aware of Scribus as a first-rate application that can hold its own against proprietary counterparts like InDesign. On the other other hand, Scribus has a reputation of being diabolically difficult to learn -- and it's this reputation that I'm hoping to help change in my next series of articles on LinuxJournal.com, starting with this general introduction.

To some extent, this reputation is justified. Designed for desktop publishing, Scribus is a specialty application, and not intended for general use the way that OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice is. Unlike a word processor, it is not intended primarily as a way to input text -- although you can use it for that -- but as a layout program for manipulating groups of objects for the printed page. With this orientation, it is perhaps closer to The GIMP or Inkscape, which can be disorienting to the general user.

You might say that Scribus treats each page and document as a container in which you place and edit objects. It is not so much a creator of new content as a manipulator of existing content, and its editing window and tools are all designed to make that manipulation as easy as possible.

Scribus is very efficient about helping you achieve this goal, but it does mean that the editing window is not quite what most people are used to seeing. How its logic affects the editing window should become obvious as we look at Scribus' general design and workflow.

Starting Scribus

By default, Scribus opens in a dialog window with three tabs: New Document, Open Existing Document, and Open Recent. The last two tabs are self-explanatory, but New Document needs some explanation.

In the left pane of the New Document tab, you can choose the template for the document. For most documents, you can use Single Page, which refers, not to the number of pages in the document, but the unit of page design. For books, you probably want Double Sided, and for pamphlets and brochures 3-Fold or 4-Fold. For all of these choices except Single Page, you also need to specify whether the first page of the document is a Left, Middle, or Right Page; usually, it will be a right page (look at the first page of a book, and this observation becomes obvious.

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Navigating and Working in Scribus

Starting Scribus