Otherwise, the styles and colors were all intact.The original aim of this tool is to create print documents such as cards, magazines, brochures, and reports. The only issue I had was that the tracking (the space between letters) was a bit off and the upside-down 'J' I used to create the lower-case 'f' in 'Jeff' was flipped. Opening and editing my InDesign business card file in Scribus worked fairly well. That worked much better, so that's the workaround I used in the following examples. Another suggestion was to create an IDML (an older InDesign file format) document from InDesign and open that in Scribus. One suggestion I found was to create an EPS from InDesign and open it as an editable file in Scribus, but that did not work.

When developing this solution, I read a few blogs on how to edit InDesign files with open source software but did not find what I was looking for.

For more on this subject, check out my articles: Expensive tools aren't the only option for graphic design (and never were) and 2 open source Adobe InDesign scripts. Note that there are many open source graphic design solutions that can be used instead of or in conjunction with Adobe InDesign. In this article, I'll show you how I edit Adobe InDesign files with Scribus and Gedit. While these situations are admittedly rare, open source tools like desktop publishing software Scribus and text editor Gedit can save the day. You need to make a simple change (e.g., fixing a small typo) to the file, but you don't have immediate access to the Adobe suite. For example, imagine you're a commercial printer tasked with printing a file created in Adobe InDesign.

However, there are times that open source tools will get you out of a jam. To be a good graphic designer, you must be adept at using the profession's tools, which for most designers today are the ones in the proprietary Adobe Creative Suite.

Indd scribus