Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Before your school newspaper or yearbook shells out the big bucks to license Adobe InDesign CS5, take a moment to consider Scribus, a free, open-source desktop-publishing option.

If you’re already used to a desktop-publishing platform such as InDesign or Microsoft Publisher, Scribus should make sense to you, kinda. Scribus includes much of the same functionality, you just have to poke around a little to find it. The right-click menu is your friend for editing text properties, colors, shapes, etc. If you’re not used to desktop publishing, Scribus is more or less as easy to learn as any other program, and if you get stuck, you’ll find lots of free documentation and tutorials online.

To test Scribus out, I whipped up a quickie sample flyer loosely based on LEARN NC’s most recent professional development catalog. I was able to do just about everything I wanted to do, with the exception of adjusting the colors. I couldn’t find a way to fine-tune them — that feature may exist, but I couldn’t find it after several minutes of searching. So if your school colors incorporate specific shades of, say, red and blue, you may have to make do with reasonable facsimiles. If you’ve got a good eye for color, or if getting the exact shade you need just isn’t that big a deal to you (probably the case for most users), then Scribus will suit you just fine.

Scribus is admittedly a little clunkier than InDesign. Before you install Scribus, you’re supposed to install GhostScript to enable the print preview function — a fact they don’t tell you until after you’ve installed it. It’s not the most stable program I’ve ever used, either. In the process of creating my sample flyer, Scribus crashed three times. Future versions promise more stability, but until then, for the sake of your sanity, save and save often.

If your school is already using a recent version of InDesign or Quark and you’re happy with it, you probably won’t want to make the switch to Scribus. But if your school yearbook or newspaper is on the verge of getting sacrificed on the budget altar, or you’d like to create a professional-looking department newsletter without spending a few hundred dollars on software, you’ll definitely want to give Scribus a try.

Scribus

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