How its logic affects the editing window should become obvious as we look at Scribus' general design and workflow.īy default, Scribus opens in a dialog window with three tabs: New Document, Open Existing Document, and Open Recent.

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. 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. You might say that Scribus treats each page and document as a container in which you place and edit objects.

With this orientation, it is perhaps closer to The GIMP or Inkscape, which can be disorienting to the general user. 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. Designed for desktop publishing, Scribus is a specialty application, and not intended for general use the way that or LibreOffice is. To some extent, this reputation is justified. 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, starting with this general introduction. 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. Scribus has mixed reputation among free software users.

Scribus program