## Scribus Specifications

### Summary:

Scribus is a GPL desktop publishing (DTP) program similar for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. Its goals are to be both user friendly, yet offer advanced professional features.

### Document Features:

- Supports Unicode text and fonts including right to left text for Arabic and Hebrew script via freetype2.
- Frames, visible and hidden with support for rounded edges and corners for text and objects, rotatable and scalable
- Page Templates - Page Palettes allow for easy page management
- Document-wide layers - editable and items can be moved
- Paragraph styles with numerous paragraph and text style options (alignment, fonts)
- Manual kerning of type and embedding fonts allowed in all documents including PDFs.
- Object linking, grouping, moving, locking, resizing and converting to different object types.
- Margins, guides and snap to grid which can be user defined, as well as hidden or visible.

### Professional Publishing Features:

- CMYK color including ICC color managed previews of images and embedding ICC profiles in PDF documents for accurate screen to print color.
- Creation of CMYK and RGB color Postscript separations.
- Sophisticated PDF creation, including interactive PDF forms, support for nearly all PDF field types, and JavaScript actions.
- The ability to output to professional quality image-setting equipment including advanced Level 3/PDF 1.4 postscript devices.
- Encapsulated PostScript import with previews on the page canvas / EPS export.
- Full support for Level 2 PostScript output, a very large subset of Level 3 and support for PDF 1.4 features including transparency, gradients and 128 bit security.
- Full Compliance with PDF/X-3, an ISO standard for creating "press ready" PDFs - a first for any DTP application.
- Supports font embedding and sub-setting in both postscript and PDF export.
- Scribus can convert all supported fonts into Postscript outlines, which can be further edited in Scribus.

### Ease of use features:

- Drag'n'drop with KDE 3, including a Drag'n'drop scrapbook for frequently used items such as text blocks, logo images, backgrounds etc.
- Online help browser with extensive and continually updated documentation in English with sample files included.
- Easy to use tools and palettes for measurement, rotation and other object properties
- Full support for both TrueType, Type 1 Postscript and OpenType fonts.
- User configurable keyboard shortcuts.
- Ability to run in 27 different languages without recompilation.
- Sophisticated automatic hyphenation engine with several languages available.
- Easy to use drawing tools for custom shapes including: freehand lines, lines, curves, ellipses, bezier curves, polygons, etc.
- Detailed and flexible user preferences for document and application defaults

### File Formats:

- EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) PNG (Portable Network Graphics), TIFF (Tag Image File Format), and XPM (XpixMap).
- Scribus native file format is fully documented and XML based - a PDF of the file format is available on line.
- Scribus can also import and export well-formed SVG 1.0 (Scalable Vector Graphics) including text on a path, images and text. Scribus can export all features of a Scribus document as SVG. Images are converted to PNG when exporting SVG.

### Architecture:

- Developed with GPL QT 3 for Linux and "Unix like" operating systems. Scribus has been ported to Fink and is actively maintained for X11 applications on Mac OS X.
- Plug-in support and API including a color management plug-in and special character inserter.
- Powerful Python Scripting Plug-in for extending Scribus functions and automating tasks, as well as calling external applications within Scribus.

### Target Usage:

- Layouts for newsletters, corporate stationery, posters, training manuals, technical documentation, business cards and other documents which need flexible layout and/or sophisticated image handling, as well as precise typography controls and image sizing not available in current word processors.
- Users needing the ability to output to professional quality image setting equipment, as well as re-purposing for internal printing, web distributed PDFs or presentations.
- Users needing to create interactive PDF forms for presentations and cgi-form submission via PDF.