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Stellar PDF Creation with Scribus

Jack Wallen — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:42:10 +0000

Professional PDF documents can make or break a marketing campaign, or advertising promotion, or even seal the deal with a client. For most people this job is done with either QuarkXPress or Adobe Reader. Both outstanding tools with a high price. Did you know, however, there was an open source tool that can do the job as well and even a little bit easier? Yes there is. Scribus is the name of the tool. It’s open source, cross platform, and best of all – free!

The feature list for Scribus will impress you.

Supports most image file formats
CMYK and ICC color management support
Printing via level 3 postscript
Transparency support
Layer support
Encryption support
Interactive PDF support
And much more…

Getting and Installing Scribus is simple. Fire up your Add/Remove utility, do a search for “scribus”, select the results, and apply the changes. Once Scribus is installed you will find it in either your Office or your Graphics menu (depending upon which desktop you use).

When you first fire up Scribus you will be greeted by a simple New Document “wizard”. This wizard allows you to choose from various layouts, page sizes, margins, etc. It’s not until you are actually working in a document that you can see the power of Scribus.

Scribus Working With Template

As you can see (in the image to the left) Scribus can create complex documents. The document you see is actually a single- layered document. This particular document is a template that can be downloaded from the Scribus web site. Personally I would have done this with multiple layers in order to simplify the creation of the document. Creating such a complex single-layered document also makes it hard to select and manipulate individual elements.

Layering is probably one of the key features of Scribus, and one you should definitely grow accustomed to. You treat layers in Scribus as you would in The GIMP, QuarkXPress, Publisher, or any quality print-ready tool.

Once you start playing around with Scribus you will discover useful feature after useful feature. There are features that you will certainly use more than others. The text editor tool, for example, is where you create and edit the text you place in text frames.

Scribus also has some good support paths including:

There is also a documentation page on the Scribus site. This page has quite a bit of information on using Scribus.

The Downside

The only downside Scribus has is that it can not import other proprietary formats. This was a choice that the Scribus team made because they felt like importing other formats would comprimise the integrity of the original document. In reality this is a smart move, because it won’t make Scribus look like it can not handle Adobe Pagemaker, QuarkXPress, or Microsoft Publisher formats. You can, however, import SVG, EPS/PS documents into Scribus.

Final Thoughts

I have used Scribus from everything to simple fliers, to complex marketing brochures, to books. I am always amazed at the power of this tool as well as the versatility. If you are looking for an application to create impressive PDF documents, and you want to do so either on all platforms or on a budget, Scribus is the perfect application for the job. Scribus is the perfect solution to your desktop publishing needs.

You’d be Stupid Not To…

joshua — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 08:15:32 +0000

Adobe Reader is the *worst example of software bloat I’ve ever had the bad experience of using. In fact I have not idea why I did use it for so long.

Adobe comes bundled with Windows and it includes the ability for previews in the Explorer sidebar so I guess that was useful enough for me not to worry. But lately I’ve had to read and use a lot of PDF’s and the fact it can manage to use up to 70mb of Ram for just three documents made me decide to look for an alternative.

I found Foxit Reader (well actually I already knew about it), it’s the best PDF reader and here’s why:

Tiny Size, Foxit Reader weighs in at under 3mb, 17Mb lighter then Adobe Reader sounds a bit ridiculous but it’s true.

Light on Resource, it’s fast and uses about a third of the memory that Adobe Reader does.

Tabbed Browsing, I wish all productivity and office software included tabbed browsing, but luckily Foxit Reader does. For me personally, consulting 10 PDFs at a time is pretty normal and it’s much easier to work without my task bar clogged up.

More intuitive, All the most commonly used tools are laid out nicely along the menu bar.

Stacks of extra stuff if you can be bothered to find it, that includes minimising to the system tray, looking up words in the dictionary, playing multimedia embedded in documents, reading history and so on.

Other boring features, yadda yadda Foxit Reader also includes better security and privacy controls, a tool for converting the PDF into a text file and an annotation tool for diagrams, drawings and notes.

Controls itself, no background updating, prompting, nagging, connecting to the Internet or generally being a severe annoyance. (“Adobe 8.7292 is available! Do you wish to update?”)

However,it’s not perfect (Although I did discover there are a hell of a lot more features in PDF readers then I sure ever use them for).

Light and fast though it is, it does actually lack a few things which I do like about Adobe Reader. The two major ones are that Adobe lets you preview PDFs in the Explorer sidebar and copy and past text and objects straight from the PDF.

Ultimately though, speed and performance trumps both of those and Foxit is my choice for today!

* Actually I think I should have said the best example, but you know what I meant… stupid English language.

** Also, incidentally, If you are a Songbird Media Player user then I’m working on a theme which aims to give Songbird 0.7 a more integrated look when used in Windows Vista.

RSS Bandit

joshua — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:45:15 +0000

I’ve been a user of FeedDemon RSS reader ever since it became freeware. It’s a fantastic application and has a lot of great features, not the least being synchronization between NewGator Online and multiple devices such as Mobile phones and desktops.
However good as NewsGator Online is, after a while I began wishing FeedDemon synchronized with Google Reader instead. I much preferred having a desktop application then a web-based, but I would prefer still more to have access to both.
NewsGator Online is adequate as a web RSS reader, but nothing more, I find it slow and un-intuitive. In contrast using Google Reader offline through Gears just can’t be compared to a dedicated desktop application like FeedDemon.
However just this week I was excited to see the first Alpha version of RSS Bandit released. RSS Bandit is a desktop feed reader written with the .NET framework and which synchronises with either NewsGator Online or Google Reader!
I have only just downloaded it and begun using, so I’ll provide a better update later on how I find it, but so far I’m loving it.
The first thing you’ll notice is it looks very much like Outlook which provides for an attractive, clean and familiar interface, but it would be nice to have the option to change it a bit, even just the colour scheme.
Yes, there are quite a few little bugs, but I haven’t noticed anything major so far. It’s very fast, in fact a lot faster then FeedDemon, although I will have to wait and see if it slows down as it gets more feeds to handle.
As I said, I’m liking what I’m seeing, but haven’t had a proper opportunity to try it yet, so when I have I will let you know wether not it really is a better solution the FeedDemon and if I’m converted.

Google Reader integrates with Google Talk

Daniel Pataki — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:20:19 +0000

To me it really seems like Google is integrating everything they have. In the end they will just have one app, named GOOGLE and it will do everything from sending emails, sharing photos, making the dinner and flushing the toilet. Of course this is web 2.0, so you will be able to geotag and share where and what toilet you have just flushed.
Well, on to the point. Google has put a fun feature in Google Reader, the ability to see your Google Talk friends’ shared items. You can simply click on the share icon under each feed entry and it will also be available in your shared items.
This way you sort of create a feed of feeds, sharing all your favorite items. These will be available to others through the “Friends’ shared items” in the top left. This is one of the best sharing features I’ve seen, it is very much like the awesome system Stumbleupon uses. It is easy to share and easy to view shared items, a paradise for the active people among us.