Success Stories 2005-2004-2003
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.
Here is another example...of the bookmarks we have designed in Scribus:
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. File:Example.jpg
