Scribus Vs Indesign

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Scribus and Indesign

Scribus is an Open Source application that functions very much like Adobe Indesign. Both are used for Desktop Publishing (layout design for brochures, e- books, newspapers, and pdfs). Since Scribus is Open Source, it's free and free for others to contribute to the application, Adobe Indesign however is moving to the Adobe Cloud and is becoming more expensive.

When saving and editing a file in Indesign, you won't lose data by the inherent "trimming" function. What this means is that if you resize an image to 1/10th of its size the application gets rid of some data because you're not using it. This function processed multiple times is what allows some documents (pdfs) to take up less space. Scribus doesn't have this function, so your files may be large depending on the image qualities used. The work-around for this is to edit your images in GIMP or Photoshop before using them in Scribus.

More On:

Scribus Information (Scribus Wiki)

Indesign Information (Carlpedia Page)

Compatibility

Although Scribus and Indesign are similar- Indesign's file format (.indd) is proprietary and can NOT be read/opened/imported by Scribus. It's currently unclear if Indesign has taken steps to be able to open Scribus files (.sla)

There are conversion processes that can be found by googling, but you may lose your layer functions and in some cases the whole of the file because it converts 'every page' of the file into a separate file*. As of today (10/30/13) Scribus is on version 1.4.3, with 1.5 in beta promising IDML files (the other export option Indesign offers besides pdf).

* Method found on eHow.com html>

Final Notes

If you are just starting to look at layout design, I recommend trying Scribus as the free alternative. However, if you're a long time Indesign user, you should continue to use Indesign to avoid the conversion hassle of your past projects.