January 29, 2025

Scribus versus Inkscape

I want to make a nice label for a mineral specimen. I want the species name in one font (big and bold), and all other lines in a "normal" font.

People suggest Inkscape, which is probably a good suggestion, but I am hoping for something with less of a learning curve.

On Fedora 43, this does the trick: 

dnf install scribus
This gives me Scribus 1.6.5.
It pulls in a bunch of qt5 packages, announces itself as a desktop publishing tool, and off we go. They call Scribus a "layout program", which sounds encouraging. They also tell me that it can generate PDF, which sounds nice.

We have a document, on which we place objects, most of which are frames, often text frames. We can also have image frames, line frames, and more.

The document itself has no color or content, but a frame can fill the document, solving that problem.

We can work in layers. Some things that we see on the screen (like margins and grid lines) will not appear on the final output.

Try some stuff

Insert -- Text Frame gives me a text frame.
Windows -- Properties (F2 toggles) gives me a properties window.

You put text into the frame using the "story editor". Ctrl-Y is a keyboard shortcut, or find the icon.

Frustration

I can select a font and a font size in the story editor, but nothing changes on the display. They claim that Scribus is WYSIWYG, but so far it is not working that way, nor is it easy or intuitive to use for the simple use case I have.

This is often the trade off. You get a lot of power and a steep learning curve, but doing simple things is hard. Good documentation can help a lot with that, but Scribus is lacking in that regard. The documentation I have found so far fails to start from basics and build knowledge. In other words, it fails.

Stick with it a bit longer

I found the following, which may help me with a concrete example. The second link (from the Scribus wiki) is more or less useless. The first looks promising for a new user. It has screen shots and seems to start from basics.

To enter text into a text frame, first click the mouse in it to select it (the border turns red). then double click in it to be able to enter text. This works.

Now to change text properties. Use the mouse to highlight text. Click once to select it, Then right click to get a menu. The last checkbox is "properties", which is what you want. There should be an option group here labeled "Text" but there isn't.
So I do some searching.

I find that F3 gives me a very detailed properties window, and I can use it to change the font size of previously selected text. This works in a WYSIWYG fashion, unlike fooling with the "story editor" that the first tutorial had me using.

I use file -- export -- save as PDF. This works. And I have printed the label I wanted on my Brother printer. I used a PDF reader to open the document and do my printing, but I see that Scribus has a print feature built in, so I may not have needed to use PDF at all.

All said this took about an hour (and I almost gave up).

Let's try Inkscape

Inkscape does not claim to be a page layout tool. It calls itself a vector graphics editor. They say you should use inkscape to create graphical assets, and then use scribus to assemble them for print.

Once again, on Fedora 43: 

dnf install inkscape
Only 14 packages, mostly python3.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org