Scribus vs InDesign or Quark? [closed]

Question

For someone who has worked in the professional publishing industry, I rely on InDesign and Photoshop for creating professional documents, even if they're as simple as a business card. Sometimes I don't have the luxury of working with these expensive programs, however, so I look for alternatives that can get the job done. I'm familiar with GIMP vs. Photoshop, and in a pinch I can use GIMP, but prefer Photoshop because of a decade of experience with it.

I've used Quark and InDesign (and PageMaker before that), and consider InDesign the tool of choice for page layout.

I recently ran across an open source product called Scribus and wondered if anyone with Quark/InDesign experience has tested this, and can put forth a list of what it does and does not do by contrast.

(I've downloaded its installer and read through a small bit of the documentation but have not had time to do much with it yet.)

Answer 1

I used Scribus recently on a personal project. For an OS GD app, it's quite impressive. I'd definitely put it above PageMaker in terms of usability and features. that said, it's far from finished and does have some annoying quirks (such as you can't undo text edits).

InDesign is pretty high end, but for personal, smaller project, Scribus might be just fine.

Answer 2

I am not a designer but I have worked in publishing and seen the wonders of Quark. Scribus is a stone knife that may one day evolve into an electronic publishing.

But for now it is maddeningly non-intuitive. My one suggestion to its developers is:

Try to anticipate the basic objectives of the entry level user. For example if someone wants to put words over a photograph. How would they achieve this in the minimal number of steps.

Answer 3

Scribus is promising but I haven't found it to be comparable to InDesign or other page layout programs. Perhaps I'm missing something in the export options, but it seems to be quite difficult to find the right menus in order to produce a high resolution, print-ready file. Perhaps if I used it more often I would find it to be more useful, but going from InDesign to Scribus is quite disappointing (more so than going from Photoshop to GNU Gimp).