Scribus vs InDesign
Which one is better?
If you’re in the printing industry, you need a good tool for preparing some printing stuff like books, magazines, newsletters and so on. This app should include tools for managing pages numbers, creating master-pages and so on easily and you should be able to exports file formats like pdf professionally.
In these days, Adobe InDesign is the most famous app for publishing and typesetting. And meanwhile, Scribus is the best open-source alternative for InDesign. In this article, we want to have a look at both applications and compare them. If you’re new in this field and want to choose one of them for learning, this article can help you. And if you’re already the user of InDesign or Scribus and want to switch to another one, you’ll find this article useful.
User-interface and User-experience
First of all, one of the most important things for learning and using an app is its UI and UX. With a horrible UI and UX, of course, your learning and working path will be as bad as hell.
To be honest, Adobe for its all product had a great job about UI/UX. And InDesign is not an exception. And in Adobe Suit CC 2019 this UI/UX had a lot of improvements and now using and learning Adobe apps is really easy.
Default dark theme is also one of the amazing parts of InDesign 2019. We have also really easy access to managing master pages in this app. adjusting styles also is so good in InDesign. Another thing that’s really lovable in InDesign is managing texts and styling them. In Story Editor in Scribus, I have no access to a lot of important things for styling a text block and for doing so I should make my styles for each part. Obviously, this process is time-consuming. For example, changing the line spacing is not able directly in Story Editor of Scribus and I should have a specific style for doing so. Doing it in Scribus Dev version 1.5.4 is even more awful because managing styles causes crush all the time (And there is a lot of reasons for using Dev version). When you’re working on a very detailed project, you need to adjust a lot of things quickly and doing it with this working path is horrible.
Managing mater-pages is also one of the main reasons why I prefer InDesign UX. Managing master-pages in Scribus, especially in stable version is so hard and confusing.
All of this is not just about doing something but about how we do something. Scribus can do everything that InDesign can do (and sometimes even more) but how we can do so is also really important. You should be able to do your tasks as easy and fast as possible and struggling with an awful UX is not something that we like.
Snap tool is also one of the main things that I love in Adobe InDesign (and Photoshop, Illustrator and so on). But this tool in Scribus is not really as good as we want. Of course in Scribus, Snap tool is well when we want to adjust our items with grid guides and so on. But this tool is not helping efficiently when we want to adjust our elements with each other in a specific way. But Adobe does it so well. Especially in recent versions of its products.
All of these things and a lot more causes a fluent work path in InDesign and we don’t have it in Scribus. In my opinion, the most important advantage of InDesign compared to Scribus is UI/UX.
Importing files
Adobe currently is producing a lot of important graphic apps of the world like Photoshop and Illustrator. And of course, Adobe has an amazing way to manage files between these apps. So, for example, importing vector files like eps and ai (Illustrator generated vector files) is pretty easy in InDesign. But you also can import ai files in Scribus without any problem. You can also import eps files in Scribus via File>import>get vector file. One of the interesting things about importing eps files in this way is importing its colors. When you import eps file in your document, Scribus will automatically add its colors to your document color list. If there is a font embedded in the file that is not installed on your system, Scribus will tell you about it and you can fix the problem (installing it or using another font).
But importing eps and ai files are not as smooth as in InDesign. You can have a lot of problems during this work. For example, one of the most potential problems about importing eps files is about bitmap images embedded in the file. If the creator of the .eps file was using Illustrator with Photoshop and embedded the bitmap file as .psd file, Scribus will have a problem importing the bitmap part in the .eps file. This occurs not because Scribus have any problem but because Adobe not published detailed information about its file formats in some cases. So other applications may have problems using them.
On the other hand, Scribus can import .svg files without any problem. .svg files (scalable vector graphics) are one of the most famous vector formats mainly used for web and a lot of applications like Inkscape and Illustrator can export them. Unfortunately, Adobe InDesign can not import this kind of files. And this could be a problem using InDesign. But however, you can install plugins to fix this problem.
RTL support
Well, a lot of you like me maybe want to use InDesign or Scribus for languages like Hebrew, Arabic and so on. In this case, you need to have good support for RTL. Supporting RTL is not only for the text but also the binding layout is important in this case. In Arabic, Persian, Urdu or Hebrew books and documents, the order of the pages is reverse. This is so important when we’re preparing a document for printing. In old versions of Adobe InDesign, we could easily change the binding layout to RTL. But in new versions, we need to install InDesign especially for these languages but however, we’re sure about the right support for it. But unfortunately, Scribus still can not support RTL binding layout. But you can use this solution if you really need RTL binding layout. However, still, it is not added to official Scribus and you should do it manually (and it is not as easy as you think). But I think in the future this issue will be fixed.
Language support
Language support for good hyphenation, UI language and spell checking in Scribus, like any other open-source project is really great. For example, I can have good hyphenation for languages like Esperanto in Scribus (and this is not a supported language in InDesign). So the hyphenation is not applied randomly in the word. I also have a lot of choices for UI language in Scribus like Esperanto, Persian and so on. But in InDesign, we only have this language support for several languages.
Exporting files
InDesign can export a lot of file formats like .pdf, .eps, .swf, html, xml and so on. One of the amazing options in exporting formats for InDesign is epub files. So you can easily export your epub document directly in InDesign. But still, this feature is not supported in Scribus (but developers are working on it). On the other hand, you can export .svg files in Scribus but InDesign can not do it. Both applications are really well at exporting .pdf files and you have a lot of options for exporting your preferred .pdf file.
If you want to choose one of these apps, you should consider that Scribus is really fast progressing and a lot of problems may be fixed in the future. But however, UI/UX in Adobe products is fascinating. But of course, you should pay for these beautiful products. But using Scribus is completely free and you can use it on your Linux OS.