Scribus releases latest DTP beta
1 January 1970 Scribus on Monday released the third beta of Scribus 1.3.2, aka Egalité, a desktop publishing (DTP) program released under the GPL. Although it can't boast the fine polish of Adobe's InDesign DS2 or Quark's QuarkXPress 6.5, Scribus is definitely a professional DTP program, not a toy.
While most people think of Macs when it comes to DTP, delays in market leader QuarkXPress support for Mac OS X have opened the door to other programs and platforms. Despite the fact that Adobe, with InDesign, has made the most of this vulnerability, there's also room for Scribus on Linux.
Scribus supports CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) color separation and commercial grade output in Adobe PDF and EPS (Encapsulated Postscript) for document export. The program also supports 128-bit encrypted PDFs with controls on printing, copying, and editing the documents.
It also enables DTP workers to embed fonts and ICC (International Color Consortium) profiles in PDFs and include PDF form fields and JavaScript controls in PDF documents.
With this beta, Scribus also has enhanced TIFF and PSD (Photoshop) file format support and now supports EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format).
While Scribus is not a photo manipulation program, it does include such image effects basics as tinting and sharpening. This enables pre-press shops to tweak a publication's images without having to call out for more work to be done with GIMP or Adobe Photoshop.
The shipping version of the open source package runs on Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, Mac OS X, and BSD Unix. Scribus is based on the Qt C++ application framework, as is KDE, but it can work with any Linux/Unix window manager.
With 1.3.2, Scribus is also available for Windows using Qt 3. The project has also added a new developer to the team, Jean Ghali, who works on the program's Windows migration.
The UK-based team also says that they've "made significant progress in cleaning and restructuring the code base, which has lead to speed improvements, clearer code, and opened the way forward for future 1.3.x development."
Would-be Scribus users can download source tarballs and document templates and some RPMs from the project's SourceForge Download page. There are also Debian and Ubuntu, Windows, and Mac OS X installation files.
Source: desktoplinux
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