When it comes to free, open-source desktop publishing (DTP) there’s little as capable, as fully-featured, or as widely used in professional settings as Scribus.
Now a brand new stable release of this powerful page-making tool is available, the first since 2019.
Scribus 1.6.0 ships with “thousands of enhancements and fixes across all areas of the program”, with its development team noting it’s more featured, faster, and more stable than all versions prior.
Used to create everything from newsletters to books, Scribus provides scores of features commonly found in paid-for, proprietary DTP software, allowing users to design and create complex layouts, manipulate text, insert images, manage colours, and export documents for free.
Interestingly, Scribus is now around 23 years old, so it is a solidly mature product. Yet it can work on macOS Apple Silicon and also has a distro-independent AppImage installation available. It’s the perfect tool to design once and use across all desktop OS’s.
Scribus has many unexpected touches, such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of colour blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus.
The Scribus file format is XML-based and open. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents can be recovered with a simple text editor – sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs.
Reliable PDF creation is the key to a successful print run at a commercial printing house, and it has been a pillar of Scribus development since the early days of its development. Scribus was the first DTP program in the world that supported the demanding PDF/X-3 specification. Scribus also offers a wide range of options with respect to PDF export.
See https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2024/01/scribus-desktop-publishing-software-major-update