blur, brightness etc.), I don't think it offers any effects for vector shapes. "outer glow") but I see that whereas Scribus has Image Effects on bitmaps (e.g. This could possibly be done with "effects" (e.g. left page headers, which I understand Scribus can do.īut the biggest issue I think is, currently in Illustrator I use the "Appearance" panel which allows you to easily create a black leader line (for labeling) that stands out visually because it is outlined in white, by giving it two strokes, a black stroke on top of a thicker white stroke. I am surprised that you say "intelligent" headers/footers are missing in Scribus? Maybe I don't know what this means, but I imagine automatic page numbers, and dynamic right vs. But, depending on how that's encoded, it might also be possible to change using BBEdit? change all the "gray 1 px solid" boxes to "black 3 pixel dotted" boxes, so that could be a problem if not possible in Scribus. For text edits, I'm pretty comfortable with plain text editors, so I think BBEdit would do the trick, and the XML file format is a HUGE benefit. I was surprised to learn about the search/replace limitation. I tried the stable version 1.4.x originally, but it would never get past the "loading color profiles" or something, some kind of incompatibility with Mac OS 10.14 I think. Or, maybe for my project Illustrator really is the best solution. If anybody has experience with other DTP software like InDesign, etc., I'm curious if that's where I should be headed next, or, are there features I have not yet discovered in Scribus that would make Scribus worth pursuing further. Also, I am realizing, I suspect there isn't ANY software that allows text blocks/images to "flow" from one page to the next as you insert content above it this may be an unrealistic fantasy (I'm guessing, 99% of graphic novel artists simply plan all page layouts carefully in advance so they don't need this feature). So, for page number and left-vs.-right page layout, there would be some "fiddling" involved, which diminishes those Scribus advantages over Illustrator. I read on these forums that Scribus doesn't do well with large documents anyway, so you need to break it into chunks, make PDFs separately, and then combine them. can't just click & drag as you can with Illustrator, need to work with a "frame" for everything, need the extra step of "adjust frame to image size"). Some awkwardness in working with resizing images on the page (e.g. Not nearly as powerful in working with vector shapes no dynamic vector effects, for example (nothing like "outer glow", or multistroke "appearance", etc.) 100+ pp.).īut, after using Scribus a few days, I notice (I think) some deficiencies of Scribus relative to Illustrator: Possibly other features I cannot envision that will help with a "large document" (e.g. (This sort of "works" in MS Word, except it gets somewhat unreliable when a Word document is built of nothing but text blocks and absolutely positioned images it's not really designed to work that way, and I gave up on Word for this.) Ideally, blocks of text/graphics should "flow" from one page to the next as I insert content at the beginning. Document-wide search/replace if needed (not sure if I can fake this in Illustrator for dozens of separate files, probably not). Master pages with page header - I assume this is a big advantage (although, can be "faked" somewhat in Illustrator). Ability to insert / delete / shuffle pages and have them correctly change page number, and correctly change left vs. right "master page" formatting (although, in Illustrator I simply set up two different templates) The reason I moved away from Illustrator is wanting multi-page features like: Now, I have no experience with InDesign, Quark, etc., and just started using Scribus so I don't know what features to expect. Since I'm doing a book, surely I want Desktop Publishing software, right? Unfortunately I don't have InDesign (or Quark), so looking for less expensive options, I arrived at Scribus.įirst, I am grateful to see this product exists at all, and ready to donate if it becomes a good "fit" for me. Then I realized, this seemed silly to do. The idea was to generate a PDF of each page, then use software like Adobe Acrobat to combine the separate page PDFs into one large PDF which works great. I started this project in Adobe Illustrator (because I have Adobe CS 5.1). Basically it's a large number of PNGs I've drawn, combined with text blocks (with my own custom font) and vector shapes into a complex layout on each page. ![]() I'm working on a book that is similar to a graphic novel (although I favor a relatively free-form and hand-drawn look, so specialized software like Comic Life and Clip Studio seems not suitable).
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