The open source world offers programs in most of the key application areas; for example, OpenOffice as an integrated office package and the Gimp as a bitmap editor. Now there's a desktop publishing offering, too, called Scribus. It's multi-platform with versions for Linux, Unix and MacOS, as well as Windows XP and 2000.

Many of the things you would expect to be able to do with a DTP program are present in Scribus. You can lay down text and graphics frames, link text to flow from frame to frame, create outlines for text to flow around and lay out master pages for repeating page elements and design grids. Longer document tools, such as tables of contents, are supported, though there's no indexing as yet.

Most attributes are controlled from a multi-paletted properties panel, so you can adjust both a frame and its contents. There's very good control of colour, with both CMYK and RGB support, though none we could find for proprietary spot-colour systems like Pantone. Output can be directed to a desktop printer or to a file as PDF.

There's a heavy emphasis on typography within Scribus; it's very strong on printers' marks, offering several choices of quotes, standard ligatures and gliffs. This strong accent on professional printing can be daunting for beginners, particularly those who don't understand the terminology. Is it really necessary to provide colour correction for three different forms of colour blindness?

There are some peculiarities in the way Scribus works, too, in comparison to mainstream DTP programs such as InDesign or even Microsoft Publisher. For example, when you import a graphic into an existing frame, the graphic is imported at its native size with only a portion of it showing within the frame. Most DTP applications scale the image to fit the frame, but you have to change Scribus's default properties to achieve this and even then it only scales to the longest dimension.

Scribus relies on other open source applications for some functions. For example, it uses the Gimp for bitmap editing and Ghostscript for producing PDF files. There's little sense in reinventing the wheel and it's good to see the developers working with other projects - it handles imports from OpenOffice well, too.

When you look at the documentation you can see that it's written by publishing professionals. The section on graphics import, for example, includes quite a treatise on the perils of using JPEG files.

The specification for Scribus claims it's 'user friendly, while still offering advanced professional features'. While we wouldn't quibble with the second part, its user friendliness is a bit patchy. It has a steeper learning curve than entry-level programs like Microsoft Publisher or PagePlus, but rewards a bit of extra study and can certainly produce professional-looking pages.