Sharpen your desktop publishing skills
Word processors like LibreOffice Writer can do a great job of sprucing up documents, but if you’re serious about page design, you can’t beat a dedicated desktop publishing tool. Scribus is capable of producing anything from brochures and flyers to full-blown newsletters, which you can print or share digitally via PDF as you see fit.
It’s packed with powerful tools and options, but in this tutorial we’ll introduce you to the fundamentals of using Scribus: from changing existing content to designing your own documents from scratch. It can be installed or run several different ways: via AppImage, using its own dedicated PPA, or through Flatpak. While the stable version (1.4.x) is listed as ‘recommended’, it’s been effectively abandoned because the current development version (1.5.7) is on the cusp of replacing it, so we’ll be focusing on that version in this tutorial.
The PPA version is best for those running the non-LTS version of Ubuntu, currently 21.04:
If you’re on the LTS release cycle (Ubuntu 20.04) install Scribus through Flatpak if you have that installed, or use the portable AppImage if not (https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/files/scribusdevel/1.5.7). If you’re using Flatpak:
Once installed, can be launched via the Show Applications button. It’ll be described as (Beta), but don’t worry – it’s as close to stable as you can get.
