Scribus is a libre page layout program for almost every operating system
Welcome to Scribus, a page layout program for Linux, Windows, macOS, many current UNIX and *BSD systems, OS/2 Warp 4 and variants, as well as Haiku.
Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has evolved into one of the premier Open Source desktop applications. Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, with support from a large and growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to develop and improve “one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there” (TechRepublic). The leading German IT website heise.de listed Scribus as one the of the best Open Source programs available.
Underneath a user-friendly interface you will discover a powerful tool that provides much more than you probably expect.
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 color blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus. Scribus has not only been translated into many languages, but also supports countless writing systems and scripts following the Unicode standard – more than any other DTP software. It also includes and supports color palettes/palette formats that are following international standards. The latter even resulted in Scribus becoming a prototype for the implementation of such a standard.
The Scribus file format is XML-based and open. Even damaged documents can be repaired with a simple text editor, which is impossible with proprietary binary DTP file formats. Moreover, Scribus can be automated via a scripting engine using the popular Python programming language. If you’re creating a PDF form, you can also use JavaScript to enhance your PDF form’s functionality.
Scribus’s PDF export (especially for print) is famously reliable, because PDF-related issues are always considered as a priority by the developers. Scribus was also the first page layout software that fully and reliably supported the now ubiquitous PDF/X-3 standard.
Get in contact with the Team
The Scribus Team are real people, and it’s easy to get in contact with them and an active online community. The best way to contact the team is on matrix.org , IRC on the libera.chat network in the #scribus channel. Otherwise, forums are available at https://forums.scribus.net. For reporting bugs, follow the bug tracker menu link.
From left to right: Christoph Schäfer, Andreas Vox, Gregory Pittman, Craig Bradney, Jean Ghali. Photo: Gerrit Bruijnes
