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I am currently on a roll in regards to open source software! I am here again to introduce to you yet another open source software called Scribus! People usually use this software to help them create professional looking publications and documents, just like Adobe InDesign (or Microsoft Publisher if you are not into geek language). So desktop publishers can rejoice when they ditch their crappy Microsoft Publisher. In fact, Scribus has almost all the features that the commerical software Microsoft Publisher has. But then who in the publishing industry really uses Microsoft Publisher anyway?

And if you have been using Microsoft Publisher, you will find that Scribus is a bit too complicated to use. Not as user-friendly as it claims to be but if you would like higher quality and more professional looking publications, you will see that using Scribus is the way. It makes use of GIMP (which I had touched on a little while back) to do graphic editing and Ghostscript for PDF conversion. Scribus recommends using high quality fonts (and not freeware/shareware fonts) to do your publishing. While I agree with them completely, it is surprisingly that Scribus, an open source developer recommends commercial fonts instead. Kind of ironic. But they do include some additional fonts in their installation. It’s too bad that they don’t have the fonts preview option, so that you can see how the fonts look like before you use it. Another feature which I like is the Story Editor, which allows you an interface to easily format your text but still doesn’t come with a text preview. Being a software which relies a lot on fonts, I find that rather weird not to have.

And I tried to do some photo editing on their software and found that it is rather difficult. I can’t properly resize my image into the image frame. I had to do the resize on another software (or you can do it with GIMP from Scribus itself) and then re-import it back. Well, from what I heard that is what the developers want (to ensure the quality of the image), but find of frustrating to know that anyone can just resize the image from another third party software and just re-import it back! Seriously, what’s the difference? Anyway, if you don’t often do a lot of desktop publishing (like me), it should be alright. And the results can be rather impressive.

This software has potential. If they would concentrate on making it more user-friendly, especially for the beginner, it would be great. Even most of the publishers don’t really need some of the features they have. I am guessing that’s not their aim. This software is more inclined to professional publishers. Not for us regular users. But they do have a very active community to help others on their problems with Scribus. So if you faced some problem with using Scribus, you can find help from their wiki, mailing lists and through IRC Chat.

If you are using Windows, you need to have Ghostscript installed first to do printing and PDF conversion.

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GIMP which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program is a good open source alternative to the very expensive Photoshop. Yes, it’s free and it has some pretty impressive features. Most users use it to do touch-up on their photos, create special effects or just to edit their photos or images. I have been using Photoshop in my office for a while and I realize that it is very powerful. In fact, you can do almost anything on it. However, even for a company user, the price is quite out of the range for most. So I am here to introduce to you GIMP.

GIMP feels a lot like Photoshop. If you have been using Photoshop, you will find the switch to GIMP quite easy. However, the interface can be confusing at times because the GUI is very spartan and bare. Yes, it has to be get used to. But the incentive is that this software is free and you won’t need to fork out thousands for a copy. I often use this software to repair and improve my photos, like those unfocused photos, or those underexposed/overexposed photos and to remove the “red eye” effect without losing quality at all. And I often use this software to resize and sharpen my images. It comes with a full set of tools for painting, graphics manipulation, compression and so on. It easily converts from one graphic format to another. If you want to create animations with this software, you can! You can even add more features to it with plugins. And the possibilities are limitless!

And finally they have created a comprehensive manual for their users. But even without the manual, you can find a lot of resource (like tutorials, guides and walkthroughs) on the Internet on GIMP. It has become one of the most famous graphic manipulation software out there and it is constantly being updated. This software for available for Windows, Mac and Linux. And oh, if you find this software useful, please consider donating to their cause. It will help create a more powerful software for all of us to use.

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