If you lay out your pages, then Scribus is just for you.

In case you haven’t already discerned my purpose here, I have set on a quest. Instead of searching for the Holy Grail, or Peace on Earth, I seek as much independence from Microsoft, and other less onerous commercial software. It is my search for tools that I can use to perform my job, as a software engineer, help my colleagues in my business, and along the way perhaps by advertising these Open Source projects bring them a modicum of notoriety. Oh yeah, that’s how I actually talk.

This installment is about a program that I have been using off and on for several years for making brochures, advertisements, and other two to three page brochures. You may ask why the limit of two to three pages? Well, it’s because I am impatient and unable to focus for longer than that on a single project or problem. This syndrome has been liken to Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, but I grew into it from my days when I would be forced to work on three to five experiments per day, and in order to analyze the data I would write computer programs on my Apple ][ or Macintosh. In those days, in order to integrate a graph, we actually cut the graph paper up and weighed it!

Anyway, I digress. This program is called Scribus and has been around nearly as long as the Internet. Now one thing you have to watch out for is occasionally the original language (Finnish) peeks through, but as far as the program is concerned, all those issues have been squashed.

Its main testimonial comes from a book that one of the Scribus authors co-authored with his father "about Mediterranean fishes, sharks, etc... it's an A4 format book, 200 pages, with more than 800 colored pictures from the author, Jacques Centelles, a Mediterranean sea specialist."

It has thumbnails of the pages that were sent to the offset printing in the PDF format, and they look great on the Web!

Anyway, this app will always be in my toolkit, even though i will most likely never publish a book.

The Web site is located here.

[tags]microface, Open Source, page layout[/tags]