Desktop Publishing (DTP) – Scribus

by DMAJ on March 9th, 2010

For the last couple of years I have been formatting a newsletter for One Tree Orchard land development project in Islandview (just outside of Fredericton, NB, Canada). The concept is on of Sustainable Community Development (SCD), which differs from standard subdivisions which plow everything and do landscape and plot placement to maximize individual lot size by safekeeping present landscape with communal greenspace and denser population numbers so as to have an overall smaller impact on the land, example with images here. The project now has an administrator that will be (amongst other things) drafting and publishing the periodic newsletter for partners and sponsors. Currently it is fabricated in InDesign, but this Adobe product is not cost effective for such a small distribution, which has lead to using Scribus (Open Source DTP). The shift from InDesign to Scribus hasn’t been without it’s bumps in the road, but it is a very feature rich and mature project and I have high hopes that a professional project will be producible from the template I’m crafting for the aforementioned administrator.

Scribus has a strong community and a number of tutorials and Wiki pages to get you start are out there.

Apress “Crafting Digital Media: Audacity, Blender, Drupal, GIMP, Scribus, and other Open Source Tools” (link)
Scribus Video Tutorials (link)
Scribus Wiki HOWTO page (link)

The template file has it’s general layout done (Main Title & image, Newsletter #, Date, Logos of Partners), now I am looking at making lists and creating hyperlinks for when the file is exported to PDF. Last will be learning how to make the PDF searchable (so people can copy content should they need to paste it somewhere else).

I have also found two Font Families that are GPL (GNU General Public License) that should go along well with the open format concept that goes well with this greener way of land developing:

Linux Libertine (wiki) (download)
Liberation fonts (wiki) (download)

A book was showcased on the Scribus site for it won a design award, used Scribus for its layout, and also went with the Free Liberation font family exclusively, which prompted me towards a publicly available Font Face, instead some of the closed exdert fonts I had previously used (sorry ACaslonPro, AGaramondPro and MinionPro).