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.
2007
Taplow Newsletter
Reporter: Andrew Findlay
Date: January 2007
The Newsletter of the Hitcham and Taplow Preservation Society has been produced using Scribus since September 2004. Before this, the editor had done the layout using Quark Express and the printshop added the pictures.
When I took over the typesetting I did one issue using OpenOffice before getting a working version of Scribus (1.2.1cvs). At that time we were using a local litho-based printshop: they were prepared to take PDF but we had lots of trouble with colour. The printshop wanted CMYK images embedded in the PDF, but I could not get Scribus to do it. In the end the printshop re-worked the PDF themselves but the results were not as good as I had hoped.
After a while I found a printshop with an HP Indigo machine: this is an ink-jet printer about the size of a small car, which is an ideal way to do short-run jobs (our print-run is about 400 copies). This improved things, but the colour was still not right - possibly because I could not get a copy of the ICC profile for the machine. The new technology allowed us to have colour on more pages for the same price so we stuck with it, and by insisting on paper proofs we have finally solved the colour problem (though I don't know what they did, as I am still sending RGB PDFs!)
The autumn 2006 issue has 16 sides of A4, and can be found on the Society's website - the PDF file on that page is the one that was sent to the printer. This issue was done with Scribus 1.3.3.3 and Gimp 2.2.8. You will see that the pages are set up for over-sized paper to allow us to have full bleed images: I have a small script that creates the crop-marks in a separate layer, and another that fills in the running footers.
The entire production workflow is now based around a Wiki: authors are encouraged to put their articles in directly, the editing and copy-editing is done online, and the text is pasted directly from the browser into Scribus. PDF drafts are uploaded for review at intervals during the layout process. The only jobs done on paper are the final copy-editing (it is hard to scribble on PDFs!) and the final proof from the printshop.
2006
Ilman naista – Finnish comic book
Reporter: Jussi Pakkanen
Date: December 20, 2006.
Description: This self-published Finnish comic book was created with Scribus. It has 84 black and white pages which contain comic strips and a corresponding commentary track. A total of 500 copies were printed using a high quality offset printer. Scribus version was 1.3.3.4 and it performed admirably. Final print quality was very good. Thanks to the Scribus team for creating this powerful program.
The comic is also available on the web (in Finnish).
Guds Ord varje dag – swedish calender with daily bible-verses
Reporter: Ralf-D. Ebel
Date: December 11, 2006
 Scribus was used to create this daily calendar with bibleverses. All bible-verses and holidays were stored in a MySQL-database. Via the scripter-interface all pages were generated, including an overview-calendar on each page. It really went fine, even if I am only a "copy-and-paste"-programmer. Thank you Scribus-folks for this good tool. The Calendar is published by Timoteus-Förlag AB, a swedish publishing house for christian literature. If some would be interested in the sources (they are bad quality), please mail me. r-d.ebel[a]timoteus-forlag.com. |
Triangle – thrice-annual newsletter of the chapel of Trinity College, University of Toronto
Reporter: Matt Townsend
Date: December 3, 2006
| I used Scribus heavily last year in university, and it was instrumental in completing my journalism degree. I am currently using it to produce the thrice-annual TriAngle, the newsletter of the chapel of Trinity College, University of Toronto.
Trinity College is the oldest and smallest college on the University of Toronto campus, and the divinity school has produced some of the leading religious thinkers in Canada. I think it's pretty cool that Scribus has been used to produce a publication connected to this, even if it's just a newsletter. All of my work from university was produced in Scribus, including some newspaper and magazine projects. Here are two links to my online portfolio: http://matthewdtownsend.home.att.net/img/design/vigil.html http://matthewdtownsend.home.att.net/img/design/project.html I think that if I, a glorified amateur, can produce this kind of work in Scribus (and Inkscape), that the pros could easily use it for very serious publications. |
Cogito – a norwegian Magazine and it's accompaning advertisment flyers
Reporter: Axel Bojer
Date: November 24, 2006
Cogito number 5 to 11 were made with Pagemaker 7.0, but as a linux-user I got tired of rebooting between Windows and Linux, so I decided to give Scribus a try. Number 12 was then made using Scribus 1.3.3.3.
Importing my old fonts was a breeze :-) But the layout had to be rebuild from scratch. The frontpage was made with the Gimp.
The articles are all in norwegian. The magazine is published twice a year, has 80 pages, 2 columns per page and many illustrations, in number 12 just in black and white. Format: 210 x 260 mm. See http://www.forumcogito.no/numre.shtml to have a look at the different numbers of the magazine.
The flyers are here: http://www.forumcogito.no/nyheter.shtml Actually, you will probably not even spot the difference between the flyers for nr. 10 and 11 (Pagemaker 7.0) and for nr. 12 (Scribus 1.3.3.x).
You probably also would not see any difference between the layout of the former issues and the last.
Thank you all for the good work – Scribus is getting better and better all the time – and pretty fast too :-)
Buchstabensuppe at Literaturbuffet – a journal, flyers, stationery, and business cards for a Viennese bookshop
Reporter: Kurt Lhotzky (via mailing list)
Date: November 23, 2006
it is time to say „Thank you” to the Scribus developers for their work and to the mailing list for its kind help whenever there were questions.
We – my wife and I – opened in october our bookshop here in Vienna – and everything – the logo, the stationery, the business cards, the journal for clients – Buchstabensuppe, all flyers and posters and the ads in newspapers were and are made exclusively with Scribus.
Have a look at www.literaturbuffet.com to see our logo. Our journal you can find here: http://www.literaturbuffet.com/html/buchstabensuppe.html
The posters for our lectures are here: http://www.literaturbuffet.com/html/veranstaltungen.html
Maybe you will like one or the other graphical idea I've implemented with Scribus!
Kurt Lhotzky, Vienna
A nation-wide advertising campaign "the Open Source way"
Reporter: Toni Anžlovar
Date: November 20, 2006
Scribus, Inkscape, Ghostscript, Pdftk, Gimp and Lcms open source tools were used to produce an entire graphical portion of a political campaign in Slovenia. Printed material included more than
- 80 posters B1, B2 or both formats,
- about 10 different jumbo posters,
- about 10 informational booklets
- tv telops, magazine and newspaper ads itd...
I designed this campaign alone (with 2 professional photographers working on portraits) in about 45 days (during which we also managed to produce 2 issues of the 'Ogledalo' magazine, which is a 32 page full color monthly magazine made with the same tools)
Scribus has proven to be an incredible tool for professional print production, which along with powerful features of Gimp and Inkscape create a toolset that rivals or beats commercial tools hands on. I am an advertising professional and i have used almost every commercial tool out there. After 10 years in the business, my entire workflow is serviced with OS tools and productivity is higher than ever before, without the loss of technical excellence.
The above tools are production - worthy, stable, speedy and high quality enough to service anyone's print production needs.
Wieża snów (Tower of Dreams) – 72 page quarterly free web magazine on fantasy, science fiction and more
Reporter: Tomasz Kucza
Date: November 5, 2006
Issue #11, autumn 2006, free PDF download (Polish language)
No 11 is the first issue which has been entirely made on Ubuntu Linux with exclusively Open Source tools: Scribus, Gimp, and Inkscape. Despite some problems I've managed to accomplish my aims. I'm very pleased and astonished to see how much progress the abovementioned apps have made since I've started to use them for the very first time. This magazine issue is not quite as good as previous issues in terms of layout, since I've been learning Scribus by doing and have had to recreate the whole magazine template first.
Altes Reich und neues Recht – exhibition catalogue, 404 pages, hardcover
Reporter: Christoph Schäfer
Date: October 1, 2006
The exhibition catalogue was made for a major German exhibition called Altes Reich und neues Recht – von den Anfängen der bürgerlichen Freiheit on the occasion of the end of the Holy Roman Empire (1806), presented by the Imperial Chamber Court Museum (Wetzlar) and the Municipal Museum of the City of Wetzlar. The book contains 404 pages, 32 of them in 4c, plus dozens of b/w photos. The cover is also 4c and hardcover. The page format is 210x280 mm.
Creating this book was pretty much business as usual, there were no major differences to what would have been done in QuarkXpress, apart from some minor, but annoying bugs that have been reported to the Scribus Bug Tracker, some of which are already resolved. Suffice to mention, almost all of the work was done with Scribus 1.2.5cvs and 1.3.3.x, Inkscape 0.43, GIMP 2.2.10, UFraw 0.8, and OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 on a SuSE Linux PC. Colour control and CMYK conversion of some images was done with CorelPhotoPaint 11 under Windows 2000.
Compilation, co-authorship, lectorship, graphics, and layout: Christoph Schäfer, Wiki author and also curator of the exhibition.
Print run: 1,250
ISBN: 3-935279-38-8
Retail price: 19,50 EUR
You can download the front matter and the TOC here
Why Are You Here - Right Now?, B/W book, over 100 pages
Reporter: Raquel Martin via Scribus mailing list
Date: September 30, 2006
Some of you helped answer my questions earlier this month.
Thanks in part to your [mailing list's] help, our group was able to complete our book in under 30 days, from brainstorming to final product.
I spent two days on the layout, it was a rough two days putting an over 100 page book together with last minute edits and changes. But it happened! And we finished our project 1 day before our deadline.
Our book is on lulu.com now – all layout was done is Scribus 1.3.0, I used some Gimp and Inkscape as well. Our print book has been sent and we are waiting on a proof, as well as other offers from some publishers.
If you'd like to see the book, it is free to download this weekend in ebook form:
http://www.lulu.com/content/447946
I am not really here to promote my project, but to thank you.
Scribus is a great program, once you learn how to work with it and not against it. The final file for this book was distilled in Acrobat--but it was Scribus that did all of the work.
I used Scribus before for an entire year, creating a print tabloid every month. It never let me down.
Thanks again,
Raquel
Anime Angels Mangazine, B/W, 44 pages
Reporter: Aleksey
Date: May 26, 2006
I think Scribus has helped us a lot with our latest issue of the zine. It really helped us reduce the filesize for both print and download (using the Web Optimized PDF script for the downloadable version). Our staff works on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows so that is another area in which Scribus has helped us a lot.
AnimeAngels Mangazine is the first Christian Manga (Japanese Comics) Magazine. Independent Christian manga artists compile their best mangas together along with regular features like Anime/Manga tutorials, Bible studies, articles about the anime world from a christian point of view, and gaming and anime reviews. [1]
Just Things, 22-page magazine
Reporter: Steve Herrick
Date: May 3, 2006
Building on my experience with the CEPAD Report (see the bottom of the page), I am now making a magazine dedicated to promoting and developing fair trade. Currently, it's coming out quarterly, but I hope to gradually increase the frequency. You can download it at justthings.info. Thanks once again to the Scribus team, without whom I could never hope to do this.
15th International Conference on Solid State Dosimetry, Leaflet
Reporter: Peter de Kraker
Date: March, 2006
Side 1 of the unfolded leaflet. For the complete leaflet see this pdf.
As a DTP amateur I always have been using Indesign for non-profit, personal designwork. When I received my first freelance commercial assignment I did not longer wanted to be bothered with the ethical dilemma's of using illegal software. As a fresh Ubuntu user I knew about Scribus but wasn't too enthousiast about it's interface and features compared with those of Indesign. However, I decided to go for it and to deliver my first commercial work using only free software and free fonts/artwork.
During the process I encountered several bugs in the 1.3* version that I was using, all related to on Canvas editing of text. As an Indesign user I was used to just edit the text live on the Canvas for most of the finetuning. At first, I was quite disappointed, but I decided to report the bugs on the bugtracker and all of them were fixed an a few days! Amazing! The exported final PDF printed without any problems on a CMYK press.
I really am amazed and very enthousiast about the progress of this fantastic software and will continue to use and contribute to Scribus. Thank you Scribus team!
"Le Tigre", "curious weekly", B/W, 24 pages, with no ads
Reporter: Raphaël Meltz / Le Tigre (via mailing list)
Date: January 20, 2006
The cover of this week issue:
Le Tigre" ("curious weekly", B/W, 24 pages, with no ads) has just published his "numero zero", which had been made at 30.000 ex. and sent by post in order to get some "abonnements".
You can see the pdf (Web export) there:
- Numero 3: http://www.le-tigre.net/IMG/pdf/lt003.pdf
- Numero zero with the presentation (What is "Le Tigre"?): http://le-tigre.net/IMG/LeTigreNumeroZeroAvecEnrobage.pdf
- Numero zero only: http://le-tigre.net/IMG/LeTigreNumeroZero.pdf
- and Bulletin d'abonnements: http://le-tigre.net/IMG/BulletinAbonnement.pdf (if you want to support a independant newspaper made on Scribus :-)
Since march 17th 2006.
Thanks to everybody who made possible that - all the developers and people on this list. Scribus still has some issues, but less and less - and it's very important that we use it and explain about free software.
Raphael / Le Tigre
An excellent example of the capabilities of Scribus 1.3.x.
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/depeches/0,14-0,39-26974737%407-37,0.html --Cbradney 11:53, 28 March 2006 (CEST)
2005
Catalog and stationery for a Web-based tea business
Reporter: Madhulika Pareek (via Newsforge.com)
Date: December 30, 2005
For putting the catalog together, I needed a page layout program. I thought of using AppleWorks, but it just was not up to the task. As luck would have it, a new project called Scribus had started just a few months before, and was far enough along for me to try. I am proud to say that I first started using the 0.7 version of Scribus for designing the caddy for my business early last year, which makes us one of the few early business users of Scribus.
Having never used a page layout program, and having never printed any metal caddies before, I found navigating through the terminology used by printers quite a challenge. But the Scribus developers were very helpful, as were the people on the Scribus mailing list, where I kept asking questions. I not only designed our metal caddy on Scribus, but eventually published our catalog, designed our business cards and stationery, and designed bookmarks and promotional materials on Scribus. Scribus has saved us hundreds of dollars in software costs while enabling us to put out high-quality work. It has also allowed us to become self-sufficient, in that we get a lot of design work done in-house, saving ourselves a lot of money.
At the time I started doing all this, Scribus was just a baby. Today, Mac users can take advantage of an easy installer. The program has grown significantly in sophistication. Scribus is a very competent program for small business.
53 page book for a role-playing game Unsung
Reporter: Kirt Dankmyer (via mailing list)
Date: October 19, 2005
I laid out the book for my role-playing game Unsung using Scribus. In fact, I did it under Windows 98 using the Cygwin version of Scribus, following the directions on the Scribus Wiki, so I was pretty determined to use Scribus...
http://www.lulu.com/content/167655
168 page book in b/w, text and photos
Reporter: Luca Colferai (via mailing list)
Date: October 18, 2005
Dear (great!) scribus staff, I'm proud to announce the first (as far as I know) real book printed in Italy composed entirely with your powerful software (version 1.1 and 1.2.x). You can see it at www.iantichieditori.it: 168 pages in b/w, text and photos, it's only in italian... sorry (but with many many pictures). Title: "Lidhollywood"; theme: Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Venezia - Venice International Film Festival (150 pictures of the 60's actors & actresses and other people...). Yes: the pdf produced by Scribus is perfect for industrial typography! I'm now working on another book (and many others I hope...) with Scribus version 1.2.3 (more powerful) in full colors. Scribus is really better than other similar programs.
Thank you!
172 page ECG workbook for medical students
Reporter: Tornóci László (via mailing list)
Date: October 5, 2005
I just got back from the printer the copies of a 172 page ECG workbook I created with Scribus 1.2.x as a teaching aid for medical students. The curves and the background grid were drawn in Inkscape, the SVG files were imported to Scribus. All text was imported from Openoffice. It was a _lot_ of work, but the result is really beautiful! One of the files contained 90 pages of real life ECG, with lots of quite complex SVG curves plus the background grids. Scribus became slow when working with this many pages, but I had absolutely no problem, it worked perfectly for me. A big thank you for the developers!
Yours: Laszlo
To see a couple of pages in PNG format, visit: http://xenia.sote.hu/depts/pathophysiology/ecg/workbook/
52-page informational booklet for students and numerous timetables
Reporter: Simon Bailey (invited via IRC)
Date: October 5, 2005
During the course of the summer holidays I was required to create a new information booklet for beginning students at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Innsbruck. Working with Linux, the only option available was scribus, and I am very pleased with what came out of it. Printing was a wheeze -- the PDF thrown at the printers went through without any problems. Creating a bleed cover was quick and easy, as was layouting text.
Link: http://informatik.uibk.ac.at/about/broschuere/page1.html
Link: http://informatik.uibk.ac.at/teaching/timetables/
Thanks to all, especially the helpful ppl in #scribus.
96-page print-ready anthology of texts from young Norwegian authors
Reporter: Johan Herland, via mailing list
Date: October 3 2005
I just want to say that even though I haven't done any DTP work in more than 5 years, and my overall DTP skills are rudimentary at best, I was still able to layout a 96-page print-ready anthology of texts from young norwegian authors with Scribus!
The book(let) contains text imported from OpenOffice, colors and pictures and even crop marks and bleeding, and the best thing is that I did all on my spare time (of which there is not much) over the course of a week.
A big "thank you" to the Scribus developers and all the rest of you who make Scribus such a great piece of quality software!
...Johan
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
2004
24-36-page bi-monthly magazine
Reporter: Craig Bradney
Date: May 7, 2006
Description: I moved from Adobe InDesign 2.02 to Scribus 1.1.x for the Renault Car Club of Australia magazine. At this point I also joined the Scribus team and have really noticed the changes and simplicity in many areas arriving as we developed the features. I have always used the very latest CVS as a way of testing and bug fixing. Screenshots of my magazine have been featured in various locations such as magazines: Trolltech's Cool Apps page Scribus. Kostenlose DTP-Lösung German Stern.de
2003
12-page bi-monthly newsletter
Reporter: Steve Herrick
Date: May 3, 2006
Description: I started experimenting with Scribus late in 2002, and began using it full-time in the spring of 2003. The image shown here is the first edition of the newsletter I was doing at the time, the CEPAD Report, done on Scribus. That was May of 2003, making it one of the earliest examples of Scribus in a professional setting.