PS: I’ve considered using Dorico for the entire hymnal, but 2 reasons I haven’t: Is there a simpler/cheaper software that would do all these things? Or should I stick with InDesign? Of course I can google “alternatives to InDesign,” but I’d like to hear what others here have used. I know how to manage what I need to do, clumsily, but I’ve never taken the time to learn the software properly. It feels like overkill, with tons of complex features I never plan to use. I’m looking for an alternative to InDesign.

Use master pages for topic headers (Adoration, Confession, etc).

Pair up longer hymns on a left page (one page plus a system, maybe) with shorter hymns on a right page.

You can get the latest Scribus 1.5.x in many ways:Įxporting to IDML is not there yet, but if there is interest for it, somebody sponsors it (and eventually somebody else programs it) it should not be that hard to create an exporter from the Scribus native format to IDML.This is tangentially related to Dorico, but on-topic enough that I feel justified in asking here.Īt present, I engrave hymns in Dorico, one hymn per project file, and combine them into a finished hymnal in InDesign.

Scribus and InDesign do not have exactly the same features set, so it's not always possible to import every item in the InDesign file.We need more test files that fail to fix the importer.The quality of the import is rather good but not perfect yet: The features are already in the Scribus 1.5.x development version and you can you can currently 'import' IDML and IDMS files from InDesign. Scribus 1.6 (the next future stable version) will have some ways, but I'm not sure that you will be really able to go back and forth between InDesign and Scribus. Scribus 1.4.x (the one mentioned in the wiki article you're linking) has no way to exchange content with InDesign (in the way you're aiming to).

Indd scribus