Scribus

Continuing on my open source rampage, I wanted to make sure to mention Scribus, a desktop publishing app that has been in development for a few years but seems to be really hitting its stride this fall. During my years doing design for magazines and newspapers I lived and breathed Quark XPress, and later I did some advertising work InDesign, so I have some pretty picky ideas about what an application like this should do. Scribus doesn't do it all by any means, and what it does it doesn't always do the way I'd like. But frankly I never thought we'd see an open source DTP app at all. I'm pretty thrilled that it's happening. When we have an open source equivalent to Filemaker (e.g. Kexi or Rekall, or whoever else gets there first), I think the open source desktop will have really arrived.

Other stuff: Check out the documentation. Of particular geeky interest is the Python script interface -- oh yeah! How many days of work would that have saved in my QX days. AquaScribus is a little helper applet that makes launching Scribus simpler and allows you to drop documents on it. FWIW, current Scribus version is 1.2.x, but if you install via Fink as I do you'll get something like 1.1.7. Update: I have been told this is wrong, and that 1.2 is available via Fink, but don't have time at the moment to investigate further. I guess you'll have to "fink install scribus" for yourself and see what happens...