Where have you been all my life, Scribus?

I was looking at this entry over on Vichar’s Linux blog and was amazed. It’s basically a list of a lot of open source alternatives to proprietary software. It’s a very excellent list, and the software listed there is top notch. What totally caught my eye is an alternative listed to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress called Scribus. I’ve been back in the Linux world for a year and a half, and I’ve heard no one mention a desktop publishing solution for Linux. But there it is: Scribus, where have you been all my life?

I was delighted to find that Scribus is included in the openSUSE distribution that I use — but it can also be used on Ubuntu, etc. There are even versions for Windows and Mac OS X. Amazing! I had assumed that I was stuck with InDesign. I like InDesign, but I didn’t like having to boot over to Windows to use it. Scribus has all the features that I want — page layout with excellent typographic controls including ligatures and other high-end features.

Another important feature that I’ve been looking for is native PDF export. And Scribus talks the PDF game like a champ. I haven’t publicly announced it yet, but I started a PDFcast, a PDF podcast, recently at another location. But I was waiting until I had some content to highlight. With having to boot into Windows to get into InDesign to do my layouts, well, I just wasn’t going through the trouble. But now with Scribus, I can do my typographically enhanced layouts and export them in quality PDF. In Linux! PDFcasting here we come!

I was so damn excited about this that I had to share it with the world. I had looked into TeX, but using a text-based system just seemed so 1970s. So I am pleased as punch to find out there’s an open source desktop publishing solution for Linux. Yow!

Check out this Wikipedia entry for more information and links to various resources.