Amid the giants of desktop publishing software such as InDesign and QuarkXPress, one name is quietly catching the fancy of print media houses – Scribus. A free, open-source layout program used to make professional newsletters, flyers, posters, and handouts among other things – a few Indian newspapers are also trying and indeed using this software – for the daily production of broadsheet pages.
Launched in 2001, Scribus is often a go-to software for creators of posters, brochures, newsletters, flyers, magazines, books, and business cards. It runs on almost every operating system – Linux, Windows, Mac OS, as well as FreeBSD, PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana, Debian GNU/Hurd, OS/2 and variants, and Haiku.
Why Scribus? Feedback from users and comments on open forums hosted by Scribus and other platforms suggest its biggest advantage is that it is free. Plus it can be customized as per users’ needs and is easy to learn and use – making it a perfect fit for both beginners and experienced designers.
As software geek Seth Kenlon explains in an article on opensource.com, “Scribus is a professional-grade layout application… One feature I particularly appreciate is the Page menu’s options to snap to guides, snap to grid, and snap to nearby items.” This feature, Kenlon says, makes quick layouts possible and eliminates the need to refer back to page and item measurement constantly.
Scribus exports to PDF and many other formats and produces print-ready documents for printing either at home, office, in professional print shops, or the newspaper pressroom. “When you’re a computer nerd like me, though, you have easier access to a computer than you do scissors and glue, and my first choice for desktop publishing with open source is Scribus,” he explains in his article.
Scribus has been a favorite with designers looking to create quality print documents with some good and free software. But newspapers? Can the software handle the high-intensity work of dozens of pages churned out in a highly dynamic newsy environment in just a couple of hours?
Kerala dailies lead the way in open-source software adoption
Yes, says VV Jacob, general manager of Systems at Malayala Manorama, one of Kerala’s – and India’s – largest newspapers. In fact, Scribus has already been in use for three years at the Malayalam newspaper. And it has been a smooth transition. “Cost has been one of the main factors behind this decision. The newspaper industry has been going through tough times. Money saved is money earned,” Jacob says.
Popular page design and layout software such as InDesign, Adobe, or Quark, Jacob explained, are expensive and (SasS) subscription-based. “Subscription costs have increased manifold and it is getting difficult to manage.”
So was the transition difficult? Jacob says Scribus has been customized as per the needs of the newspaper and plugged into its existing in-house content management system (CMS). The in-house engineers modified it to give it the look and feel of InDesign to ensure minimum inconvenience to the designers and page makers. Stories are edited on the in-house workflow editor and assigned to a page.
“We customized Scribus and factored in the earlier software’s features to ensure a smooth and seamless transition from InDesign. We shifted the pages batch by batch. While one batch was still working on InDesign, the other shifted to Scribus,” Jacob said. The media house is, however, still on PPI and InDesign for the advertisement section.
Other Kerala newspapers such as Madhayaman and Janayugom have also reportedly migrated to the Scribus open-source layout software. According to information available on Janayugom’s Wikipedia site, the newspaper migrated to open-source software in November 2019. All desktops were moved to Kubuntu Linux, all image editing was moved to GIMP, and all desktop or page layout and publishing was moved to Scribus.
Professional output formats, tools, and online support
The Scribus website explains that the software supports professional publishing features such as CMYK colors, spot colors, ICC color management, and versatile PDF creation. It has powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import and export filters, emulation of color blindness, or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus.
The Scribus file format is XML-based and open. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents can be recovered with a simple text editor – sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs, the company explains. Scribus has been translated into more than 25 languages, and more are coming in the future.
Scribus has a prompt online support system through live chats and open forums to report issues and bugs. Developers and contributors can be reached live via IRC on libera.chat in the #scribus channel.
Online support, though, can be dicey at times, especially in a highly dynamic and mission-critical sector like news, and publishing houses need to have a well-versed software team to understand and preempt issues and bugs that are likely to crop up to ensure smooth operations. As a user says, “Open sources is all about self-learning systems and at times all about hit and trial methods, but, nevertheless, a significant new phase in publishing system software that may give the software giants sleepless nights.”
