Stupid reasons we use Scribus

This article is part of the Ongoing Discussions series.

Installation • Usability • MacOS • Fonts • Other

Tell other users about the unusual things you do with Scribus -- only the sky is the limit :)

Here is a use case the developers probably never thought of...

Pinewood Derby Car

My son wanted to make a Pinewood Derby car for Cub Scouts that looks like the track. I had some sticker paper, so I made a sticker that looked like the track. I can't imagine how else I would have gotten layed out just the way I wanted it.

Oh, and another one, for my other son's birthday party, his party was at a Chocolate factory, so we made aprons...

Cookie Aprons

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I have used Scribus to make birthday invitations for my daughter the last two years.

Invitations

Each is two scribus pages, printed duplex. I scanned in her drawings and used some Open ClipArt on one of them. The hardest part was figuring out how to place the pieces so that the inside writing was on the inside right and right-side up. Scribus' guides and precise placement made it a snap to put together even with a bit of trial and error.

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Making envelopes -- should be rather mundane and simple, but it's surprising how difficult it is to do with oowriter or abiword (to name two examples of my failures).

Scribus makes it quite easy; I don't bother to make a custom size page, I just use letter paper, put some grid lines to line up text boxes, fill in the contents, rotate the text box and that's it. So I don't forget how to use it, I add an instructional non-printing text frame that tells how to insert the envelope into the printer.

Example: for my Photosmart printer, it says, "This will print with the photosmart printer, which feeds to the right, face down, return address end of the envelope first."

After that, I just save the file, and reuse it, using Story Editor to alter the contents.

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Paper CD wallets - lay 'em out, print 'em out, score with dead biro, cut 'em out, fold 'em, glue 'em - hey presto, beautiful and economical homemade CD wallets.

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Our company needed a way to tag the ads with a type of version, through IRC I discovered that scribus can do this through python scripts. A script was developed. So now before an ad gets sent to a customer, they are prepared with a stamp to identify it. This stamp takes the form of the file path to the image itself. This works out nicely as the ads are placed in a heirarchial hierarchical order of <companyname><bookname><adtype_adsize_adclassification>. The only editing that is to be done is already done through the modified python script.

This has proved to be a great boon for us, as now when the customer replys with changes, they no longer need to send all sheets, but rather the ad, and we can tell which book and which ad exactly.

(as to why this was difficult before, we run rive books - some customers run the same ad in each book, so it used to be quite difficult and required alot of communication between the company and the customer to determine what changes they wanted to what ad in what book, as a result this has effectively reduced alot of time and overhead that used to be present.) We publish YellowPages.