Creating Brochures, Brochure Printing, High Quality, Graphic Design Software,PDF/x3

Scribus is a serious Desktop Publishing Program available Free. Published under the Open Source Licence Scribus is an easy to use but powerful program. It can be downloaded from their Web Site.It is a program in the category of Adobe InDesign and Quark Express. It is excellent for creating Brochures and very easy to set up and arrange custom page sizes.

So what's the difference between Scribus and a program like Publisher? Well first of all it is an Assembly program designed to format and arrange Artwork for High Quality printing. It can create Documents from a simple One page Flyer, to and Entire Book and package the finished article in a way that a professional printer can use. It supports the PDF/X3 Pdf file export format using Commercial Printing Profiles. This format also converts all Images to 300dpi CMYK and uses no damaging file compression. It can import and use PDF, EPS and SVG files retaining all the Vector and Bitmap elements and allows you to scale and edit them.

Scribus is an ideal companion to Inkscape (for creating Illustrations and Logos) and The Gimp (for preparing images). The idea of Scribus is to use these other programs to create the artwork and Image elements and use Scribus to bring the finished product together. This is similar to InDesign which uses Illustrator(for creating Illustrations and Logos) and Photoshop(for preparing images). The difference being that Inkscape, TheGimp and Scribus are all Free Open Source programs.

If you look at the brochure Image above you can see the elements used from the different programs. The Title text was created in Inkscape along with the Avenger Logo. The Images of the bike were edited in TheGimp and the Brochure was produces and Published in Scribus.

Scribus has Text Kerning Tools that are of a very high standard and give you a huge range formatting options. It links to Images rather than include them in the working file, this enables you to work on large projects with hundreds of pages without locking up the computer. When you are finished you can create a 'Packge' with all the linked files copied into a folder for you, this package can be sent to another artist with Scribus who can then continue working on the project. This is very useful for an organization publishing a book with more that one Writer or Artist contributing to the project.

Initially you may find the program a challenge but in reality it is very easy to use and very quick once you have learned how to use it. I have assembled a series of Tutorials showing you how to use Scribus properly on my web site www. ScribusTutorials.net The Tutorials have step by step which also include Tutorials on Inkscape and TheGimp.Scribus is also an excellent program for producing high quality Ebooks. There is also and article at my Web Site Desktop Publishing News about the features in the new Pre-release version of Scribus 1.3.5.

Cheers and may the Graphics be with you.