Indirect support for legacy Microsoft Word. docx can be read by Scribus with reasonable fidelity. Additionally, HTML and PUB documents have a high degree of support as well. odt documents have the highest degree of support, Scribus' import filter can import document text along with paragraph style information.

Scribus can import text from a variety of common open formats with various limitations. Images tables have their own frame types and, much like commonly used graphics programs such as GIMP, frames can be layered to achive a specific effect. Text must be placed inside of a text frame. In Scribus the document is just a canvas with various frames. It is Unicode native and supports layouts with complex scripts such as kanji and right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew. Scribus uses its own XML-based file format. The Scribus file format is XML-based and open.Scribus is a full-featured Qt-based desktop publishing package available for Linux, Windows, MacOS, and other operating systems.

Scribus has many unexpected touches, such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of color blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus. Underneath a user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colors, spot colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation. Encouraged by professionals and beginners alike, the Scribus Team, with support from a large and growing number of enthusiastic contributors from all over the world, is dedicated to develop and improve “one of the most powerful and useful open-source projects out there” (TechRepublic). Since its humble beginning in the spring of 2001, Scribus has evolved into one of the premier Open Source desktop applications. Welcome to Scribus, a page layout program for Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana, Debian GNU/Hurd, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp 4, eComStation, Haiku and Windows.

Software scribus