Icon of program: Scribus

Scribus for Mac

  • Free
  • 2.9
    101
  • 25.6K
  • V1.6.4

Open source desktop publishing app

Scribus is a free open-source desktop publishing program that works across platforms and offers some impressive powerful features.

Although it's completely free, Scribus offers some serious publishing power including support for CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation. Although the interface isn't as slick as it could be, Scribus Aqua is a port of Scribus using Qt Free so that it looks and works much better on OS X than Scribus in its raw form.

One thing that isn't so easy to master on Scribus is formatting. You may encounter several formatting issues when importing text, as everything has to be done manually. Even just changing fonts doesn't happen in real time - you have to change them and preview how they will look in another window. You can however drag and drop elements with ease as well as export documents in EPS, SVG and PDF format. Importing PDF and EPS isn't so easy however - you need GhostScript to do so and this isn't easy for beginners to scripting.

Scribus has a lot of potential although its certainly not a patch on a Quark and can be very unintuitive to use at times.

  • Pros

    • Open source
    • Lots of powerful features
    • Exports and imports PDF
  • Cons

    • Unintuitive in areas
    • Formatting isn't straightforward
    • Requires some scripting knowledge
 0/5

App specs

  • License

    Free

  • Version

    1.6.4
  • Latest update

  • Platform

    Mac

    Other platforms (1)
  • OS

    Mac OS X

  • Language

    English

    Available languages

    • German
    • English
    • Spanish
    • French
    • Italian
    • Portuguese
    • Russian
    • Turkish
    • Chinese
  • Downloads

    25.6K

    Last month's downloads

    • 399
  • Size

    240.00 MB

  • Developer

Also available in other platforms

Program available in other languages


Icon of program: Scribus

Scribus for Mac

  • Free
  • 2.9
    101
  • 25.6K
  • V1.6.4

User reviews about Scribus

by Anonymous

why no text art. Scribus is an impressive program. It has one BIG weakness in my view. If I'm writing straight text I use OpenOffice. If I use scribus it's to make posters, and the first thing I usually do is deform some text. Scribus won't do that. Open office draw does, Pressworks does, Publisher does. Why not scribus.

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Laws concerning the use of this software vary from country to country. We do not encourage or condone the use of this program if it is in violation of these laws.
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Softonic
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Score result: Clean

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Last scan
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
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File Integrity

File
Scribus_V1.6.4.dmg
SHA256
fd5dfdfbcfd333f8079ecf6f92ea2784fd687401b6bd07055bb60a20f25ee19a
SHA1
a5c1991e853892085f3da99f412e0e9cb335cb39

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Scribus has been thoroughly scanned by our advanced security systems and verified by industry-leading partners. This file comes from the official developer and has passed all our security checks, showing no signs of viruses, malware, or spyware.