“Scribus has mixed reputation among free software users. On the
one hand, users are vaguely aware of Scribus as a first-rate
application that can hold its own against proprietary counterparts
like InDesign. On the other other hand, Scribus has a reputation of
being diabolically difficult to learn — and it’s this reputation
that I’m hoping to help change in my next series of articles on
LinuxJournal.com, starting with this general introduction.“To some extent, this reputation is justified. Designed for
desktop publishing, Scribus is a specialty application, and not
intended for general use the way that OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice
is. Unlike a word processor, it is not intended primarily as a way
to input text — although you can use it for that — but as a
layout program for manipulating groups of objects for the printed
page. With this orientation, it is perhaps closer to The GIMP or
Inkscape, which can be disorienting to the general user.”