Friday, October 26, 2012

Scribus for PowerPC Macs

There's a lot of cool open source, pro-level production software available for Macs: GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, etc. Some of these have dropped support for PowerPC, but you can download older PowerPC versions that are mature and still useful. Scribus is one such example. It's a layout and publishing application for publishers needing a wee bit more than Microsoft Office, yet finding a pre-compiled installer for a PowerPC version was like being on a scavenger hunt. Even their Sourceforge site seemed to be scrubbed of older versions. After a bit of googling, I finally found one lonely download link at 1-2-3 Printing. Scroll down to the link for "Scribus_1.3.3.10_Mac.zip" and download. This version will run on Tiger and up. I also included this in my Mediafire folder in case the above link disappears.

When you first start Scribus, you get this error:

Scribus Ghostscript warning

So to use those features, you need to install Ghostscript available here. After installing, then go into Scribus's preferences in the External Tools section, and under PostScript Interpreter enter /usr/local/bin/gs for name of executable. That's the path to Ghostscript. Then you should be good to go.

To get a newer version of Scribus, I suppose you could install it via Macports or Fink, but if you wanna endure that pain, you might as well go full-on Linux:)

2 comments:

  1. Scribus is one of the better open source "replacement" apps, but if you can buy an old copy of Adobe CS1 or even Pagemaker for cheap, you'd be better off. I have never understood why they can't bundle Ghostscript with it. Something to do with the licenses, right?

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  2. Thanks this might help me. My old MacBook that I take out with me from 2006 is still running 10.4, because stupid me hasn't upgraded the ram on it yet.

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