What is Scribus used for?

Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing application for page layout and print-ready documents, with strong support for complex text and many languages. It is a good fit for laying out magazines, brochures and newsletters; and typesetting multilingual documents.

Is Scribus open source?

Yes. Scribus is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at scribusproject/scribus and is written mainly in C++.

Yes. Scribus is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.

Can I self-host Scribus?

Yes. Scribus can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Scribus an alternative to?

Scribus is an open-source alternative to Adobe InDesign, Affinity and CorelDRAW. Other open-source alternatives to Affinity include Inkscape, Graphite and GIMP.

Is Scribus actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Scribus was on 2 October 2026. The project has 634 stars on GitHub.

Scribus: open-source alternative to Adobe InDesign, Affinity

About Scribus

Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing program for laying out pages for print and digital documents. The GitHub repository is a community mirror of the project's official Subversion repository, which the Scribus team prefers for development and bug reports. The mirror is updated manually and is not supported by the team.

Complex text layout is a highlighted area. The program supports right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew, bidirectional text, Indic scripts, OpenType font features and a customizable hyphenation character. According to the README it covers more than 500 languages. Text frames can be linked directly, and loading and rendering long documents has been sped up.

Bugs and patches should go to the Scribus bug tracker rather than to GitHub pull requests. The project site provides a wiki, mailing lists, forums, IRC chat and a WebSVN browser. The application is written in C++.

Key features

Desktop publishing and page layout
Right-to-left and bidirectional text support
Indic scripts and OpenType font features
Linked text frames across pages
Faster loading of long documents
Customizable hyphenation character

Good fit for

→Laying out magazines, brochures and newsletters
→Typesetting multilingual documents

Built with: C++
Tags: desktop-publishing; page-layout; typesetting; print; cpp; open-source; opentype

Scribus: questions and answers

What is Scribus used for?: Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing application for page layout and print-ready documents, with strong support for complex text and many languages. It is a good fit for laying out magazines, brochures and newsletters; and typesetting multilingual documents.
Is Scribus open source?: Yes. Scribus is open source under a custom licence. Its source code is on GitHub at scribusproject/scribus and is written mainly in C++.
Is Scribus free?: Yes. Scribus is open source, so the software itself is free to use under the terms of its own licence.
Can I self-host Scribus?: Yes. Scribus can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Scribus an alternative to?: Scribus is an open-source alternative to Adobe InDesign, Affinity and CorelDRAW. Other open-source alternatives to Affinity include Inkscape, Graphite and GIMP.
Is Scribus actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Scribus was on 2 October 2026. The project has 634 stars on GitHub.