Having recently had to convert an Indesign project to the ope source Scribus format I found the process a little time consuming but workable once I dug into the Scribus documentation. Sometimes the styles would be forgotten or incorrectly applied for text and adding CMYK text colors was a little complex but overall it worked well and I was able to create a Scribus version of my Indesign file.

Some unavoidable problems came up when I found I had used some image manipulation of Indesign such as image shadows and text on a path. While the shadow simply had to be redone in Photoshop, the text on a path could optionally be done in the 1.3.5svn version (this version also supports reading Illustrator files natively). Since this only 1.3.3.12 is the current stable I also put the text on a path feature back into the photoshop file but that issue should be esolved when 1.3.5 is released as stable. Apparently the Scribus development is planning a PSD importer but that is still in planning.

Some other things that slowed me down but turned out to not be too difficult were:

• changing text color to a CMYK value (must add a new color and use the edit text box)
• getting images to fill the existing image frame
• guides were hidden (bring them to the front)
• customizing space between text lines (in edit text > create styles)
• selecting frames that have other frames partially above them (seems to be a bug, move other frames out of the way)
• text wrapping around frames (it finally worked but it seemed to take some time for the wrapping to work)
• relinking all linked files when the .sla file was moved (a bulk link option would be nice.)
• identifying colors for text that are CMYK or RGB

Tags: Open source