Scribus

I am a huge proponent of Open Source software and one of the applications that I have been crying out for is a good DTP package. At the moment, and for several years now, I have been using Adobe CS2. I feel that this is the benchmark to which anything else has to aspire, despite Adobe's questionable upgrade and pricing policies!

So, every now and again, I dip my toes in the water of Scribus. I have enjoyed using it in the past but still feel that it is still not ready for primetime use. I design and layout my CD sleeves for my band using using CS2, so I need something that I can rely on to do the job. Scribus is very, very good at the moment, but one or two things let it down for the work that I do. One of them is that I can't seem to create a page and have negative guides. That is, say I layout a page with 240mm by 120mm - actual CD booklet size. One normally requires a 3mm bleed, so in CS3, you simply either bung in a negative guide or enter the bleed amount during the PDF export cycle. Nice and simple and does the job.

Not so in Scribus. I can't find any way of achieving the same thing.