Scribus

Not to defend anyone who was ranting pnamajck, but your comment "i took one look at your rant and burst out laughing. who would post content on the internet without using spell-check? " could be answered by he was using Scribus to compose his rant since there is NO SPELL CHECK in scribus! OMG! Don't get me wrong, I LOVE SCRIBUS! but seriously? no spell check? And don't give me the open source spell check will work find BS story. It's not compiled and in a windows world that is the kiss of death. Really? A desktop publishing program with no way to check spelling? I'm sorry, but that is one serious setback IMHO. Compared to CMYK and Postscript, etc.. spell check should be a walk in the park programming-wise. Minus 2 stars for lack of spell check alone. And if compiling aspell is SOOoooo easy then do it and offer it as a "plug-in" or what have you, but don't expect your users to be programmers.

This is a dissapointing program as it offers all that any desktop publisher would seem to need but then completely dissapoints by disinformation, lack of essential basic features and a website "how-to" that is out of date referring to features that no longer exist in the current version ! I am like tens of thousands of users of Adobe PageMaker who have seen their favourite program sabotaged by the failure of Adobe to update their product for the current version of Windows; instead choosing to force users to buy "InDesign" a bloated expensive program that does not work, has never worked and probably will never work. What is the dedicated PageMaker pro to do then ??? Wait here is salvation - a knight is shining armour, up to date, working with all current OSs with all the features of the best high end DTP programs AND it's Open Source FREE !! What more could you want ? Unfortunately what you get for free doesn't have any support or even basic guides. YES there IS an online guide but it doesn't apply to the current version and constantly refers to "tabs" and "drop down pallets" that no longer exit - very exasperating. I installed this program then AFTER the install the "installation window" popped up (!!!) saying that BEFORE the install another program had to be installed (why isn't it incorporated with the installation procedure then ?) Ghostscript (a PostScript interpreter) but there is no link to that program. No worries - I found it then redid the installation WITH the GhostScript installed. The first time the program starts up it takes about 30 mins before it starts as it is compiling a font cache from the installed fonts. After that no menu item is accessible. You have to exit the program then restart it. After this you are completely on your own to 'trial and error' it into shape. I wanted to have a rectangle filled with a colour (black) - a VERY simple and basic procedure - but there is no way to do this. The help application does not contain any information that is relevant and is basically a reiteration of the programmers description of the program. An online search via Google reveals information only on the Scribus website which, yet again, only repeats the above descriptive information without giving any specific answer. I am sure that this program is capable of doing great things but it is intent on "shooting itself in the foot" so that it is virtually impossible for the first time user to use. Work on updates and improvements to the program should be halted IMMEDIATELY and instead a searchable help index with SPECIFIC IDENTIFIABLE STEP-BY-STEP information added FOR THE CURRENT VERSION OF THE PROGRAM. Then it will start to be useable.