Living Open Source

I thought I’d exhausted my list of useful open source (or at least free) software that churches might be interested in. Then I came across Scribus – a desktop publishing application that is a great alternative to Microsoft Publisher.

Scribus is an open-source program that gives you page layout tools for Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows. It has a fairly user friendly interface and supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and even PDF creation.

The install may not be as straightforward for some, as you do need to install Ghostscript for Scribus to work. But it is well worth it. Notes for installation for Windows users can be found here.

I must admit I have been trying to ween myself off Microsoft Office for some time in favour of OpenOffice, but the one feature that demanded that Office remain on my PC was for DTP. How else can you create flyers and posters? With Scribus it looks like I might finally be able to go to Add/Remove programs and select MS Office.