[scribus] Which Version to Use?

[Stephen Tiano]

Hullo Peter,

Thanks much. That WAS helpful.

I’ll tell you, as a freelance book designer of 25 years’ and about 100 books’ experience, I got interested in Scribus because I hate Adobe’s move to a subscription model for Creative Studio (meaning, for me, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat Pro). First, I resent like hell paying perpetually for a piece of software. I don’t mind upgrading as I see fit—usually every few years, as I don’t need every single enhancement the moment they come up with them. I also don’t like that it’s either one at a time you can subscribe to each piece of software, or else the whole package of every single program in the complete suite. So I’m riding the version of Creative Studio that I own as far and as long as I can and preparing for life once CS no longer works with whatever Macintosh computer and OS I’m on when it happens. I’m already fairly squared away with GIMP as a stopgap replacement for Photoshop, but I want to check out Acorn and Pixelmator; eventually I’ll check out Inkspot as an Illustrator replacement.

Anyway, I’ve noodled some with Scribus and see enough similarities with InDesign—tho’ I’m sure it may be missing features I’m used to or implements some of them differently—that I’m comfortable I can get up to speed with it. And I'd wanted to write a book about book design for a while. So I got the idea to write a book about book design for self-publishers, complete with exercises that lead to a printer-ready PDF at the end of it. I thought that Scribus would be a really good choice for the page layout package to use.

I mean, I don’t even know if there’d be interest in such a book—I don’t plan it to be a tutorial to learn Scribus, but really about book design, making a book and using Scribus to do it.

Anyhow, lingwinded way of saying why I want to use the latest, in case I actually publish it, whether in print or as an ebook, or even serialize it on the blog.

Thanks again, Peter. I’m off to download 1.5.2.

Steve

> Hi,
> 
> I had a look at your site and blog.  As one of the team members, It is
> interesting to learn a professional book designer is interested in
> Scribus.
> 
> That said to answer your question, I would recommend trying 1.5.2 and
> see if it has enough stability for you. Save early and often. Feedback
> welcome.  The real question comes down to features you really need in
> the newer version.
> 
> 
> Version 1.5.3, on the way has quite some invasive changes, as we are adding in code for complex
> scripts such as Arabic and RTL languages which do not work properly in
> Scribus.  This is a much desired feature which we have had a hard group
> of developers working on this quite a while.
> 
> Hope that helps,
> 
> Peter