Once you’ve toured the menus a bit, open a new document and you’ll be able to preset several elements. But the Outline, Layers, Styles, and Properties windows are all commonly used for styling your pages. You won’t need all of these all the time. You’ve got some controls on the top bar, but many of the functions you need live under the Windows menu. Unlike Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher, you must open a lot of the toolbars in new windows. Making A Bookīefore you create your book, you’ll want to adjust some settings and get familiar with the layout.

The downside is that you’re limited to the wiki page for how-to information and the interface is more cumbersome to navigate. So what you have is desktop publishing software that will do everything InDesign can (for a book) without having to pay anything. While the team that built Scribus strives for a user-friendly interface, it’s not perfect. Updates might take a long time to come out, and functionality might not be the best. That means it’s free but with that comes the caveat that those maintaining it are not getting paid. It’s a simple page layout tool built for all common operating systems and totally open source. Today we will look at creating a simple novel in Scribus and comparing it to other popular options. If you’ve never tried, or even heard of, Scribus then you are in the right place. Thinking about laying out your next book yourself but not sure you want to invest in InDesign or another paid tool? Try Scribus-it’s an open source alternative for page layout.

Scribus program