Success Stories 2011

=Introduction= Anyone is invited to describe hers/his experience with successfully using Scribus in hers/his projects. Please note: to report any unusual reasons you use Scribus join the ongoing discussion Stupid reasons we use Scribus. There is also a special page for placing links to your work: Made with Scribus. If you want to recommend a Scribus and/or PDF friendly print shop, please use Scribus Friendly Print Shops.

=Success Stories=

50 page publication with the outside covers
Reporter: Isaac Davis via Scribus mailing list

Date: Wed Mar 16 04:59:45 CET 2005



Description: Just an update for everyone. We have a 50 page publication with the outside covers and two center pages in color. Everything else is grayscale. I went ahead and exported the pages as PDF files. I have 5 files with 10 pages each. From there, I loaded the PDF files into Gimp using the grayscale setting, with the settings set to give 300dpi (2550x3300) for a letter sized image. From there I saved each page off as a separate tiff file.

I got word from the printer today that they looked excellent, and saved them quite a bit of time, which is good, since it's all about time, which converts to money. I can't say enough about Scribus, Inkscape, and The Gimp. I put together a 50 page partial color publication that looks spectacular. You guys deserve a round of applause. I know people were thinking that I couldn't do this without a Mac, and some expensive software. We showed them. Isaac Davis

200 Page Cook Book, and other odd publications
Reporter: Wesley Allen

Date: Wed Mar 16 2005

Description Hi all, I've used Scribus for many different applications; some of which may have never crept into the heads of the developers. The largest document I created was a 200+ page cook-book for our Church, but I've also used it to create various newsletters ranging from 2 to 12 pages. The application I've used it for the most is to create a discourse analysis in Hebrew. Up until recently my Hebrew fonts weren't unicode; so the copy/create text-box/paste method worked REALLY well. Scribus helped me make the full-time jump to Linux! Wesley Allen

full color 70 pages photo-book, generated using a script and published through Lulu.com
Reporter: Hermanitos Verdes

Date: Mon Apr 4 2005



Description I received today my first photo-book, automatically generated in scribus using a python script i had posted on the mail-list some times ago, and then published full-color using lulu.com pod service. It looks great! it's a 6x9 inches, 70 pages, perfect-bound booklet, in my opinion very well printed by colorcentriccorp on a Xerox iGen3 digital printer. the PDF produced by Scribus worked perfectly on lulu's production chain. Cover images have been made using Gimp, so i had a great result using pure open source software. I'm glad i used a script to compose the book, in just 5 minutes i had a quite modern and elegant book with almost 140 pictures in it, each one with it's auto-generated label reporting date and hour extracted from exif information. The script takes two pictures at time and check their orientation, then scales them according to mutual orientation and places them on the page after having checked if it's an even or odd page. Pictures' labels are generated by the script extracting EXIF informations from jpegs. I just had to refine the first and last page, add titles, presentation and credits on the first page and, 10 minutes after the beginning of the process, i was able to upload a PDF file to lulu. Amazing

1180 page, full color catalog proof
Reporter: Mark Kimsal (Conduit-IT)

Date: Mon Apr 14 2005

Description: As a way to visualize the completeness and correctness of client data, we are using Scribus to quickly generate proofs of a 1000+ page catalog. A simple color mock-up was made with image frames and text frames. The XML file format was easily pulled apart to work with PHP. PHP can perform complex queries against any data source and glue the XML chunks of a Scribus page back together in no time, placing image filenames and text into the appropriate XML tags. The entire operation of exporting the database to a flat file, converting the flat file into Scribus XML, opening and rendering to PDF can be done in 20 minutes on a commodity laptop (700 Megs of RAM, 1.8 Gigahertz CPU). Scribus is used for proofing because it is many hundreds of times faster than any other DTP software on any platform. We use Adobe InDesign on Mac and Windows for the final output, but cannot wait the many hours it takes to render PDF proofs with those products.

Technical, sales and legal documentation
Reporter: Marvin Dickens (T7, Inc., Alpharetta, Georgia, USA) via mailing list

Date: June 3 2005

We use Scribus to create technical, sales and legal (contractual) documentation. Many of the documents are complicated and lengthy. They have javascript embedded in them and a couple have hundreds of user definable entries - Even so, they are easily managed and extremely robust regarding modification(s).

In short, Scribus fits our needs nicely and further, we like what we see regarding the future of Scribus as defined by the roadmap the developers have released. Particularly, we are impressed with the potential future that python brings to the table. In fact, we think that the combination of scribus and python has the potential to give document production in flexibility not found in any other application - Closed or open source.

Company's stationery
Reporter: Ekkard Gerlach (http://Linuxburg.de, Karlsruhe, Germany) via mailing list

Date: June 4 2005

I'm a 2-person business (so far, growing, http://www.linuxburg.de), and my secretary has done our header for letters with scribus, see http://www.linuxburg.de/b.pdf. I am happy with the qualitity, we zoom A4 up to legal format, print it with Konica Minolta Magicolor 2350 on legal 100g-paper an cut 4mm on right and on top to produce german A4 format. After the color seems to be printed to right end of the paper and looks printed professionally.

We plan to make (individuell) flyers in the same way with scribus (without white margins). If scribus ist able to make good flyers - and it seems to be that - we will make a donation to support that software.

Candy bag labels and movie theatre flyers
Reporter: Frank Cox (http://theatre.sasktelwebsite.net, Melville, Saskatchewan, Canada) via mailing list

Date: June 5 2005

I own and operate the Melville Theatre in Melville, Saskatchewan, Canada (http://theatre.sasktelwebsite.net).

I buy some candy in bulk (twenty pounds of Gummy Worms, and whatnot). I have a heat sealer machine and repack the bulk candy into smaller plastic candy bags for sale at my concession counter. I use Scribus to layout labels for each bag ("Gummy Bears", "Gummy Worms", "Whales", etc.) with appropriate fonts, colours and clipart, and print on Avery 5163 labels with my HP2550L colour laser printer.

I also mail out about 5500 flyers every month -- what's playing at the theatre for the next month. I use Scribus to do the layout and print a master on a Samsung 1210 laser printer, after which I print the actual flyers on a Risograph.

Annual science fiction convention program book
Reporter: Aakin N. Patel via mailing list

Date: June 9 2005

I create the program book for I-CON, an annual science fiction convention in Stony Brook, NY. I used Scribus for last year's version of the program book (52 pages, a rather complex array of frames and graphics) and it worked out fantastically well. I'll be using it again for this year's copy.