Scribus Specifications

Summary:

Scribus is a GPL desktop publishing (DTP) program similar for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. Its goals are to be both user friendly, yet offer advanced professional features.

Document Features:

• Supports Unicode text and fonts including right to left text for Arabic and Hebrew script via freetype2.
• Frames, visible and hidden with support for rounded edges and corners for text and objects, rotatable and scalable
• Page Templates - Page Palettes allow for easy page management
• Document-wide layers - editable and items can be moved
• Paragraph styles with numerous paragraph and text style options (alignment, fonts)
• Manual kerning of type and embedding fonts allowed in all documents including PDFs.
• Object linking, grouping, moving, locking, resizing and converting to different object types.
• Margins, guides and snap to grid which can be user defined, as well as hidden or visible.

Professional Publishing Features:

• CMYK color including ICC color managed previews of images and embedding ICC profiles in PDF documents for accurate screen to print color. Scribus supports the proposed openicc specification for profiles.
• Creation of CMYK and RGB color PostScript separations.
• Sophisticated PDF creation, including interactive PDF forms, support for nearly all PDF field types, and JavaScript actions.
• The ability to output to professional quality image-setting equipment including advanced Level 3/PDF 1.4 postscript devices.
• Encapsulated PostScript import with previews on the page canvas / EPS export.
• Full support for Level 2 PostScript output, a very large subset of Level 3 and support for PDF 1.4 features including transparency, gradients and 128 bit security.
• Full Compliance with PDF/X-3, an ISO standard for creating "press ready" PDFs - a first for any page layout application.
• Supports font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF export.
• Scribus can convert all supported fonts into PostScript outlines, which can be further edited in Scribus.

Ease of use features:

• Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc.
• Online help browser with extensive and continually updated documentation in English with sample files included.
• Easy to use tools and palettes for measurement, rotation and other object properties
• Full support for both TrueType, Type 1 PostScript and OpenType fonts.
• User configurable keyboard shortcuts.
• Ability to run in 27 different languages without recompilation.
• Sophisticated automatic hyphenation engine with several languages available.
• Easy to use drawing tools for custom shapes including: freehand lines, lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
• Detailed and flexible user preferences for document and application defaults

File Formats:

• EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group), PNG (Portable Network Graphics), TIFF (Tag Image File Format), and XPM (XpixMap). PSD support includes layers and clipping paths. 16-bit TIFF and PSD support is in testing.
• Scribus 1.2.x native file format is fully documented and XML based. The current 1.3.x format is a transitional format which will have a full DTD before the next stable release.
• Scribus can also import and export well-formed SVG 1.0 (Scalable Vector Graphics) including text on a path, images and text. Scribus can export all features of a Scribus document as SVG. Images are converted to PNG when exporting SVG.
• Scribus can import text with many different encodings including Unicode, as well as support for OpenOffice.org 1.x and OASIS Open Document Writer and Draw files. Styles and formatting are retained on import.

Architecture:

• Developed with GPL QT 3 for Linux and "Unix like" operating systems. Scribus has been ported to Fink and is actively maintained for X11 applications on Mac OS X. Scribus 1.3.x is actively being ported to native Win32 and MacOSX.
• Plug-in support and API including import and export plug-ins.
• Powerful Python Scripting Plug-in for extending Scribus functions and automating tasks, as well as calling external applications within Scribus.

Target Usage:

• Layouts for newsletters, corporate stationery, posters, training manuals, technical documentation, business cards and other documents which need flexible layout and/or sophisticated image handling, as well as precise typography controls and image sizing not available in current word processors.
• Users needing the ability to output to professional quality image setting equipment, as well as re-purposing for internal printing, web distributed PDFs or presentations.
• Users needing to create interactive PDF forms for presentations and cgi-form submission via PDF.