Switching from Scribus

[pauldev]

Hi,

I have just purchased Publisher and want to convert my Scribus files.

As Publisher doesn't open Scribus .sla files directly, what would be the best file format to export the Scribus files in?

Thanks in advance for any help. 

[emmrecs01]

@pauldev

Welcome to the Affinity forums.

I have no experience of using Scribus but since it appears it can export its files as .pdf, that is the format to use.  But you need to be aware, full .pdf import to Publisher is still a "work in progress".

HTH

Jeff

[pauldev]

Thanks, Jeff.

[sfriedberg]

@pauldev, How extensive are your Scribus files?  I explored Scribus for a while and found it quite limited and inconvenient.  It was easier for me to bring my original text flows and images into Affinity Publisher and do a new layout from scratch than import the Scribus files.  But I was only dealing with a small number of 5 to 20 page documents.

[pauldev]

I think that could be my best option. Thanks.

[Jochen Damm]

Hello,

in my opinion I prefer the full support of sla files or an import/export filter for them. I am used to use Scribus for about five to eight years now. Very basic but for my needs very useful. And it has functions that I miss in the Affinity Suite: The features that I mainly used and still use are the preview modes including all forms of color blindness and the scripts that are added. The addon scripts I used very often were:

• Scribus Generator - Extends Scribus with a simple but powerful Mail Merge functionality

• Color Chart - Creates a new document with all colors in the opened document and adds name, CMYK and RGB values

• FontSample - Creates a new document with sheets of letters, text and paragraph examples in different sizes.

And it is the de facto runner-up application at open source market. If you have Linux you will have to use Scribus. The team is very small and one of their main developers died a few years ago. But it is one of the best open source products in general. You have to use some workarounds but it can be a rock solid solution for many cases. Especially in combination with Krita, GIMP and Inkscape.

I mean I like Affinity but I am a quite new user. I purchased all Affinity programs only in March. I am far more used to use Inkscape than Designer. I discovered Inkscape 15 years ago and use it since then. For several years I used only several Linux systems, so I had to find some solutions.

I dream of a simple way to export files from Affinity Publisher and edit them in Scribus and vice versa. Scribus can import IDML files but doesn't export them. I really hope that will added soon. But it is more meaningful to add support on the Affinity side. Scribus' sla files are plain XML that can easily be interpretet.