Scribus is excellent, in that it really does produce high quality, print ready documents that can be sent to a print shop for reproduction. However, there is a lot of bad hiden under that good exterior.

Updated April 19, 2006. I have a bunch of new complaints.

I just gotta say, I am somewhat dissappointed in Scribus (which I will refer to as "SC" from here on out), mostly because of all the hype I have read. On the other hand, I am pretty pleased that (1) Scibus exists, and (2) Scribus actually does work!

I also gotta say, I'm going to make a number of comparisons here to the GIMP and Inkscape, being the other FOSS apps that complete the necessary tool set for FOSS desktop publishing. Also, there is some ovelap in the Inkscape and Scribus developer community.

So what are the good things?

First of all, like I said, Scribus really can do what it says it can do: produce quality, publishable documents.

Scribus has a lot of tools available, and a lot of features. SC can import SVG, EPS vector formats, and a wide range of bitmap image formats. It can flow text in highly controllable ways. It can maintain margins and formats and page layouts in a manner that one would expect from a destop publishing tool.

However...

Well, on the whole, Scribus feels and acts like unfinished Beta software. Now, I know that this is FOSS stuff and the unfinished feeling is probably because SC is, well, unfinished. So here is a list, in no particular order, of specific bugs, instabilities, and goofy user interface problems. I really should post these to SC bugzilla, if they have one.

• "Undo" does not work well at all. In fact, "undo" hardly works at all -- there is effectively no undo functionality in Scribus!! In this day and age, I expect "undo" to work exactly as expected, which is to undo the last change I made, whatever that was. A change in paragraph styles, a change in the position of an item, a change in an objects margins or shape or line weight, a change in font on one word in one section, an object deleted, an object newly created, anything. Scribus seems to have an undo feature that only works for one kind of change, undoing a repositioning of an object. And it only "undo"s one level deep! I think this is my number one complaint about Scribus and the thing that makes SC most difficult to work with.
• It is frustratingly difficult to edit the bounding box, contour line, and general shape of a "shape" or image.
• Screen redraws are very quirky. Often, a selected object (highlighted in a red dotted line with control handles at the corners) will appear to become un-selected even though it is not. A creen redraw, either by minimizing/maxmizing or switching desktops or similar will remove this artifact, and the item appears "selected" again. But it is frustrating, nonetheless.
• Several bugs appeared in the handling of images. Resizing, and checking the different scaling otions ("Free Scaling" or "Scale to Frame Size") back and forth can make an image "goofy" -- have the wrong aspect ratio or clip out of the bounding box in a way that is not intended.
• Menus are poorly organized and hard to navigate. Things are not where I expect them to be. This problem is a pretty common one among software in general; IMO, menus are one area where following the leader should be a requirement. ...need a specific example here...
• Layers are poorly managed. One can never tell when an item one wants to manipulate is one this layer or that layer. A tool option like Gimp or Photoshop's "automatically select layer" would be great. There are preferences for almost all the tools but the select arrow. Why not add that as a preference?
• Frequent crashes and general instability!
• I have more...

Keep in mind that on the whole, I am very happy the Scribus exists, and that its end results are really quite nice. I was able to produce a prefessional grade PDF brochure for my wife's business. So, these notes are more like well-intentioned bug reports rather than outright complaints.

April 19 Update

So, I have been using Scribus a bit more. I need, it appears, to produce multi-page PDF documents more often than I would have imagined. Well, the more I use it, the more I hate it. I like only one thing: the fact that the final PDF's have been deemed "acceptable" by various print bureaus, and thus, DTP on Linux really is a reality. But using the fucking thing is a horrid pain in the ass!

Why?

Importing EPS or SVG sounds like a good feature, yes? But Scribus is very often unable to render imported vector formats properly. (Hmm, I really should include screen shots!) A fairly simple EPS that I was trying to place last night, for example, came out with the border and enclosed shapes in completely different places. Same thing with imported SVG!

(Another issue with imported EPS is that gradients get flattened in EPS graphics. But this appears to happen with all EPS in all programs -- does EPS not support gradients?)

I tried three different times to import an EPS graphic and get it to look right in the final PDF, and failed each time. I tried snipping the EPS into components and importing the components. I tried using only a bit here or a bit there and using Scribus's native vector drawing tools to do the rest. No luck.

So, how to insert a graphic, and maintain transparency? PNG? Well, that's what I had to resort to, but the problem with PNG is that is does not support CMYK. And CMYK Tiff's do not support transparency!

This leads me to the problem of CMYK and color management. How can I produce documents that look nice on screen, but more importantly, PRINT NICELY?? GIMP does not support Color Management. Scribus does, but documentation on using it is shaky at best. Maybe it is just a general lack of understanding of how to use color mangement. My question is quite simple -- how can I make what I see on screen print nicely? And maybe this has nothing to do with Scribus.

Okay, so enough on that, and back to my beef about "undo". Undo does not do anything in Scribus. It is simply not implemented. This alone is almost enough for me to hate using Scribus. WTF? The Scribus developers have implemented a "skinning" feature for the UI (useless, if you ask me), but "undo", a CRITICAL feature of moderne GUI software, is left unimplemented. Can't explain it.

Ultimately, I simply cannot figure out how Scribus gets shuch good marks by the "press" and people in the Linux community. Scribus sucks. Plain and simple. Assuming continued development, Scribus will not always suck, but for right now, it is still in the "suck" phase of its life cycle. Like the GIMP ca. 1998.

So the trio of DTP tools for Linux -- vector/Inkscape, bitmap/GIMP, and layout/Scribus -- are still not yet up to professional standards. Inkscape is Really Close(TM) and GIMP is Really Super Close(TM), needing only some print tools like CMYK separations and proper color management. Assuming continued development, I imagine that 2008 will be the year that Linux finally Is Ready(TM). By that time, OpenOffice will probably not suck, either. Not the most cohesive summary, yes, but it is a web-published blog, after all. Whaddya expect?

Well, at least Scribus did work, finally. Just a horrid, frustrating mess to have to use.