Portable Scribus

What is it?

Portable Scribus is a portable standalone version of an open source page maker/desktop publishing tool called Scribus. With it, you can create professional looking documents, newsletters, magazines, and so on. Put it on your USB drive, and plug it in to any computer, and leave not trace behind when you're done. Or run it on your computer without the need of installing it.

How'd it all start?

I wanted to try my hands at a portable version of Scribus. My big problem was getting Scribus to save user settings in the Scribus folder. I then came across someone else's attempt at a portable Scribus, called XScribus, is what I used as the bases for my Scribus launcher code. (It was an older version of Scribus, so I decided to create my own with the latest Scribus version). The changes are listed under the 'Changes' header. The author and I are now starting to collaberate together with the two projects.

As of Portable Scribus 1.3.3.1, the source code has been rewritten, and is no longer based from XScribus. But if it wasn't for XScribus from the start, this project wouldn't be here. If you don't like Portable Scribus, try XScribus instead, as they are a little different.

Downloads

Version 1.3.3.12 (Released June 30, 2008):
Download from SourceForge:
Multilingual (.Zip), about 35mb compressed
English-Only (.Zip), about 25mb compressed

Changes

1.3.3.12 (Latest):
* Updates Scribus to 1.3.3.12.
* Updates Ghostscript to 8.62.
* Introduced a reduced size English-only version.

Donations

Donations for Portable Scribus can be done via paypal through this website.

Bugs? Need Help? Suggestions?

If you need to contact me for any reason, please post on Quate.net's forums. I try to view them every day. (I'm sorry for not making contact information readily available in the past.)

Please note that bugs relating to Scribus should be reported here. If you are unsure if the bug is a Scribus bug or a Portable Scribus bug, it is best to run it by me first (post somewhere on Quate.net's forums).

Myths

As Portable Scribus grows in popularity among portable applications, I've noticed quite a few people have taken assumptions upon how Portable Scribus works.

• Scribus, not just Portable Scribus, does not save anything in your applications folder. Normally, however, Scribus saves user files in the directory just before the applications folder.
• Both Scribus and Portable Scribus do not use the Windows registry. And why would they? Scribus was originally developed for Linux, inwhich there was no such thing as a registry that resembles the Windows registry. Looks like Scribus did use the Windows registry after all. However, as of 1.3.3.4 and on, Portable Scribus deletes all Scribus related registry entries when it is closed.
• Although Portable Scribus used to base it's code from XScribus, it no longer is since the 1.3.3.1 release.
• Portable Scribus may be reported by some antivirus programs as a virus, but it is not really a virus. I myself couldn't figure this out for awhile until I found that UPX, a dll and exe compression utility was probably causing this, as a few other people were having the same problem and were using some form of UPX. UPX is completely safe, but apparently is often used by viruses, which may be why these antivirus programs think programs like Portable Scribus as a virus.

Links

Main Scribus Website
Windows Scribus Website
SourceForge: Portable Scribus
WinPenPack - Home of XScribus