I seems like such a tight application. But I never had a need for it. When do you use Scribus? In which workflows or for what kind of work or deliveries? "Publishing" tells me nothing, kind of.
This is a bit like when young people express wide-eyed astonishment that bookmarks were physical objects.
"Publishing" tells you what you need to know if you know that the word as used in the internet era is a slight repurposing of a word which has a distinct pre-internet meaning.
More specifically, "Desktop Publishing" is a late 1970s, early 1980s term for packages that made it possible to do any kind of controlled-layout publishing from a computer at all.
Do you mean you could like, doodle around on a computer and get the output on the page the same as on the screen ancient one? Instead of using scissors and glue and paper cut outs? :)
Man, I kinda want to setup one of those giant touch screen tables and some sort of AR hybrid. Pretend I'm doing it the old way but with none of the downsides.
Sweeping scissors pantomime and minority report motions. Blank pieces of paper with different content projected unto them by... lasers, dependent on where on the table they happen to land.
Glue sticks that are actually remote control knobs.
Back in the eighties I remember visiting a lot of clients that had an Apple Mac, Apple LaserWriter and Aldus Pagemaker on their desk. I suspect Apple would have failed if it wasn't for their success in this niche.
Publishing in particular, instead of the more general print, means creating for mass publication workflows usually involving a press. This usually involves pre-print, different outputs options (including spot colors, separate plates for four-color CMYK printing, registration, and color profiles to match or limit display colors to inks), and printing with bleed for trimming. Many of these tools also provide advanced options for typesetting, like wrapping text around images or shapes with specific hyphenation rules, or aligning text on a baseline grid for consistency across pages.
Other tools that can print don't often offer all of these features, or if they do they don't provide as much control over them.
In the past I found it useful to design and layout a pen-and-paper role playing game book and export it as a print-ready PDF i could send to the printer(s).
Specifically, it has CMYK support, allowed me to layout images and text side-by-side and/or overlapping, along with shaded backgrounds for readability and emphasis.
Most books didn't require something this heavy, but the images were a pain without it.
I can't speak to Sribus. But also, another aspect of publishing was complete and total control over page layout. Not document layout, page layout.
Notably this including things like adjusting the spacing on a particular line in order to prevent a line break, hyphenation, word wrap, or even creeping on to another page. It's not just about setting fonts and margins, but goes deeper than that.
We use InDesign for building reports and presentations at work. I imagine this could work for that as well.
We use InDesign because it allows for much greater control over layout than something like PowerPoint. We want our reports and presentations (the big ones based on research) to be extremely polished.
This is its killer feature! I've had compliments from multiple pro printers regarding my print PDFs produced with Scribus. Even though most usual PDF pipelines are Adobe based, Scribus PDF files are superior.
This is not true. Dont forget PDF is format developed by Adobe. There is no reason Scribus output would be superior.
Its probably simply that you are more mindful, experienced, systematic user where adobe gets used by complete amateurs more often who have no idea about output.
I asked what the diagrams of a pretty complicated internal system in some documentation was done in once. Lots of them are just Draw.io, but these were hard coded images and there was an error that needed fixing. I thought maybe Visio or Illustrator (Inkscape is what I might use, TikZ would probably be asking a lot). Nope. Powerpoint. I guess I should feel lucky it wasn't Excel....
I use it for everything where I need to arrange images and graphical elements or put text on something (images, documents,..) in a controlled and possibly aesthetically pleasing manner.
