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1. Introduction

## 1.1 What is Scribus?

Scribus is a desktop page layout program in the tradition of Quark Xpress, Adobe Pagemaker or InDesign.

Currently, it is still in its early stages of development, but rapidly maturing and very useable. Already, it has the ability to layout newsletters, create corporate stationery, small posters and other documents which need flexible layout and/or the ability to output to professional quality imagesetting equipment. You can do all the typical tasks like placing and rotating text and/or images on a page, specify manual kerning of type and much more.

While the goals of the program are for ease of use and simple easy to understand tools, Scribus offers support for professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, easy PDF creation, Encapsulated Postscript import/export and creation of color separations.

Graphic formats which can be placed include Ecapsulated Post Script (eps) Graphic Interchange Format (gif), Joint Photographic Experts Group (jpeg), Portable Network Graphics (png) and XPixMap(xpm)

Printing is done via its own internal Postscript driver, since the driver supplied by Qt has limitations and no version has shown to be bug free. The internal driver fully supports Level 2 Postscript constructs and a limited subset of Level 3. This limitation is due to the lack of complete support for Level 3 constructs within some versions of ghostscript. The driver that ships with Scribus can embed fonts for printing and you can use and output high resolution EPS files.

Other features include manual kerning of type and embedding fonts in PDF's. The file format is based on XML,an open source file format, a super set of HTML. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents, may be partially recovered with a simple text editor - sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs.

When run from the K Desktop Enviroment 2.x, Drag and Drop is enabled. Thus,for example you can drag and drop from the desktop to the pasteboard easily. There is a drag and drop scrapbook, which can contain frequently used items including text blocks, pictures and custom shapes.

Currently, the most recent stable version 0.5.0 of Scribus supports both True Type and Type1 Postscript fonts.

Originally written in German, Scribus has been translated into Catalan,French,Hungarian,Italian,Slovak,Spanish and Ukranian.

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