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Desktop publishing for Linux at its finest

Over the years, Linux has lacked a good all-around desktop publishing application. Well, those times are over.
Written by Chris Clay Clay, Contributor

Over the years, Linux has lacked a good all-around desktop publishing application. Well, those times are over. Enter: Scribus. Scribus is a great application, that ties in features from proprietary programs like Adobe PageMaker, Adobe InDesign, Quark xPress, Microsoft Publisher, and others. Over the years I've used a few of the proprietary programs, mostly PageMaker and Quark xPress. If you are familiar with these proprietary programs, using Scribus will be like second nature. Its features and functionality are similar enough that you will easily be able to catch on and learn it, and hopefully migrate over to it and save yourself from re-purchasing those pesty proprietary programs over and over.

The first time I used it, I was pleasantly surprised to see how its interface is very clean, straightforward, yet packed with features. Inserting text elements, graphics, editing the text, everything. And, it has a powerful PDF Export feature, complete with prepress quality options.

There is one caveat with this program though. It cannot import any proprietary files, i.e. PageMaker files. If you have old files that you created in a proprietary program, you must recreate the file from scratch. Apparently the developers of Scribus did not want to encounter any issues with the proprietary programs, so they decided to stay away and make Scribus completely independent.

It's too much to go through here, but if you do any sort of desktop publishing it's definitely worth checking out. If you use Linux, Scribus should be available with your distribution.

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