Free Guide to Scribus Can Quickly Give You Publishing Prowess

We've written about Scribus, a popular open source desktop publishing application several times before, and I've watched the application steadily improve to the point where it is an outstanding tool. It's downloadable for Windows, the Mac and Linux and lets you create many types of good looking documents ranging from PDF-based documents to brochures.

FLOSS Manuals is out with a free guide to using Scribus, found here,  and it offers a quick way to get going with the application. 

Scribus itself has mostly kept up with modern desktop publishing and page layout programs. It even supports professional publishing features, such as color separations, CMYK and spot colors, ICC color management, and versatile PDF creation.

The free Floss Manuals guide to Scribus can help you create brochures, booklets, books, magazines, and good looking content for presentations. It starts out with a quick tutorial on creating a tri-fold brochure and offers guidance on using Master pages and other organizational tools in desktop publishing processes. According to the guide:

"We do not expect you to have previous experience with layout or computer graphics in general. To be sure, practical experience in visual arts (photography, drawing, and so on), or with commercial printing will undoubtedly help you to make beautiful things as well as understand various technical issues, but nonetheless all that is not necessary in order to learn to use Scribus."

If you haven't used any of FLOSS Manuals guides to open source software, they're free and quite useful. We covered a number of them here.  The guide to Scribus is fun, and you may be surprised by how far this open source publishing application has come.  For some cases in point, take a look at the list of Scribus success stories, which includes entire newspapers created with the application.

Scribus isn't quite as robust as top, high-end proprietary desktop publishers, but most of those applications are very expensive, and Scribus is more than good enough for creating good looking documents. Take it for a spin.